Always Purée
by notsosolemnly
Summary: After returning from Purity Pride camp Sirius is determined to become the new Dark Lord.
1. A Manic Pixie Dream Muggle Girl

Always Pure

Part 1

The clock in classroom 8C ticked so loudly Professor Cornball had to repeatedly increase his own speaking volume to drown it out, to which the clock retorted with ticking even louder and so it went on until he simply blasted it to pieces.

"Where was I?" he said, wiping his sweaty forehead. "Oh yes, _the power of love! _You've all heard of frogs turned princes and beasts turned princes, _well…"_

A witch was already raising her hand.

"Yes, what is it McKinnon?"

Mac, class feminist, lowered her hand. "Are there any examples of frogs turned _princesses, _and beasts turned _princesses?"_

"No because everybody knows men couldn't fall for a woman who wasn't attractive, let alone a frog, or worse, hairy, but women don't care about attractiveness"

"Thank you"

"Thank you"

At the back of the classroom, James was tapping a pencil against the desk, and glancing at Sirius, who seemed to be unusually distracted by his own thoughts. Normally he was distracted by sleep.

"Well?" he said, nudging him.

"Well what?" Sirius glanced back.

"It's just that… Mac _just _asked if there are any recorded cases of beasts turned princesses and you didn't turn it into a werejoke"

"Did she? I wasn't listening"

"I noticed"

"Couldn't you have done it?"

"It's kind of your thing, 'though. I didn't want to rob it from you"

Sirius drifted back into his vacant state. Professor Cornball told them to look for frogs to kiss and then write a presentation about it that would be due Friday. Students began to shuffle out of the classroom. Remus left to ask Professor Cornball if he could do a different presentation, arguing that since he didn't have to dissect frogs in potions class due to being vegetarian, he shouldn't have to snog one either.

"Is something wrong?" James asked, after having just contemplated asking. This sharing business, it would take some time to get used to.

Sirius straightened up. "It's Reggie. He's always been kind of withdrawn, but lately I worry that he's fallen in with a bad crowd, and bad crowds can _really _make you do stupid things"

"I know bad crowds are the worst, you really have to be wary of those"  
"I know. And I kind of just feel powerless"

Elbows on the desk, Sirius' face weighed despondently against supporting fingers.

"Have you tried talking?" James asked.

"Pfft, _no"_

"Ok, how about this. You have probably thought of it, but what if… You know, you find some nice and willing muggle girl?"

"A whore would only be a temporary solution"

"Yes it would which is why that is not at all what I meant. If you think he's fallen with a bad crowd, you have to find a different crowd. Or person. Somebody carefree and plucky who can pull him out of his slump and teach him about life and love and that sort of thing"

Mac, who had returned to the classroom to pick up the tartan scarf she had forgotten, stopped by them.

"I wonder if a carefree and plucky boy has ever pulled a down-in-the-dumps girl out of a slump"

"Probably not" said James.

"Depends how pretty she was" Sirius thought.

"Well that goes without saying"

"The other way around is more likely because of women stuff like maternal instincts and hormones" Sirius could truly sound informed when he had no idea what he was talking about. Mac wrapped her scarf around her neck and left.

"You know what I do when don't know what to do?" Remus asked, upon returning to the desk to pack his things together.

"Hyperventilate?"

"_Go to Dumbledore"  
_"Why?"

"Maybe because he just might have better suggestions than '_find some nice and willing muggle girl'"_

"What, you don't think it would work?" James asked.

"No"

"Didn't you hear about the power of love at all?"

"I thought you _didn't _mean whores"

"There are other kinds of love! Get your mind out of the gutter!"

"And where exactly" said Sirius. "Does one find a plucky and carefree muggle who won't want to punch him out of his misery?"

That, nobody knew. They further realized that not just any muggle girl would do; the ideal was a muggle girl who knew about the magical world, and they could only think of one. So the next question was; how to get her to Diagon Alley? And also, was she plucky and carefree?


	2. Dear Sir Stroke Madam

Always Purée

Part 2: Dear Sir/Madam

The following evening when Petunia was going through her mail after having been away on a class trip for a couple of days, she found a very odd letter. The envelope was a light, brownish colour and the message was written on parchment, although it wasn't real parchment but Lily insisted that that's what they called their old-looking sheets of paper. Having no idea whom it was from, she read to herself:

"'_Dear Sir/Madam! Are you a muggle? If you are, then we need _your _opinion on how to make Diagon Alley more muggle-friendly! Come to Diagon Alley _Today _at _In 10 minutes _for a guided tour!_" She paused, and glanced at the clock. It was a bit late for a guided tour, she thought and read on: "_The address is 666 Knockturn Street, Diagon Alley. (Follow Quakerstreet just outside Wizards' Kings Cross up the narrow cobblestone road and turn left at the second crossing. Voila). Looking forward to hearing from you! All the best, the committee for muggle things"_

So what if this had scam written all over? No way was Petunia pass down an opportunity to go to Diagon Alley at _night_.

Coincidentally, in another part of the island and in another dimension, Reggie was browsing through the latest issue of _House Elf World, _when he came across a letter that seemed to have gotten stuck between the pages in the delivery, a letter unrelated to the magazine judging by the anonymous look of it. Although he suspected it to be some kind of advertising he wouldn't be interested in, he still opened it and read to himself:

"'_Dear Sir/Madam! Do you have a house elf? We at the newly opened Elf Care Shop want to know what _you _think of our products. Come down to our fresh boutique at 666 Kockturn Street, Diagon Alley for a free sample of our house elf ointment and when you've tried it (on your house elf, not on yourself. Or give it to your house elf, that's less weird), let us know how it worked. _ _Note that this offer expires _Today _at _in 8 minutes, _so don't wait! Looking forward to hearing from you! All the best, Elf Care Shop"_

This offer couldn't have come at a more opportune time. Reggie was quite up to here with trying different ointments that promised dearly to remove warts and bunions but didn't as much as moisturize the skin, and although he didn't have high hopes for Elf Care Shop, he still looked forward to letting them know that their product sucked.


	3. 666 Knockturn Street

Always Purée

Part 3: 666 Knockturn Street

If the narrow streets of Knockturn Alley were dark and eerie by day, imagine how vastly un-different they looked by night. Any frequent dweller of the gloomy roads in this shady part of the capital of Wizard England wouldn't have noticed any major differences; the closed signs were up like always and the same creepy old witches you saw standing all day in the same corners were still there. The streets were a little less crowded, that was all, but the streets were so narrow one person was enough to make it feel crowded.

There was nothing on 666 Knockturnstreet except for empty premises, with a sign that read: for rent, and looking through the windows Petunia saw several ghosts. She looked at her watch, not surprised it had been some kind of joke but not feeling as adventurous as she had done when she had left her house in Swansea, and although she wanted to explore the streets some more and look inside windows, that creepy witch in the corner that kept staring at her was in all honesty beginning to freak her out. Determined to show that she was most certainly not afraid of no witch, she looked nonchalantly at the dribbling hellhound puppies in the window at 664, but the price on them told her nothing about their worth because she did not understand magical currency. At least they accepted pounds in central Diagon Alley.

A door swung shut a few numbers up the street and Petunia flinched when she saw two hooded figures in cloaks and masks come out from Denebola's Delights. Thinking that as long as she acted cool they would pay no attention to her, she pretended to fix her make up because that was the only way to distract herself she could think of. But thinking that as long as she pretended they weren't there they'd just carry on was wrong. They went right up to her and stared down at her, and eventually she met their attempt at eye contact.

"Are you lost, miss?" asked one of them.

"No, no, no" Petunia replied, dabbing powder on her cheek. "No. I was told there'd be a guided tour of Diagon Alley, that's all"

The hooded figures looked at each others' masks, and then back at her.

"Foreigner, eh?" asked the other one.

"Go back to Poland!" said the first.

"We don't like foreigners here!" the second one spat at the cobblestones demonstratively.

"I'm Welsh" said Petunia, offended. "And also, I'm a muggle"

"Go back to Wales then!"

The first one was just about to continue on his way, when his companion stopped him.

"Hang on now, Maggot" he said. "Who do we hate more, foreigners or muggles?"

"I'm not sure, Mugwort. Where's the handbook?"

Searching frenetically through the insides of their large robes, Mugwort won the contest of who would first find the handbook.

"Aha!" he exclaimed as he pressed it to his mask. "Rule number 15: Act snide towards foreigners"  
"I'll just go back then, shall I?" Petunia pressed by them in the direction of Central Diagon Alley.

"You better!"

Paying no attention to the creepy witch who kept necking rabbits and eating their heads, Petunia hurried off. The Death Eaters continued on their walk in the opposite direction, until Maggot suddenly halted, and because of this also Mugwort.

"Wait!" said Maggot. "I feel there is something we're supposed to do"

Mugwort searched in the handbook again. "Let me see. Here, rule number 2: if you encounter a muggle, make sure to torture it" He shut the book, proud that he had learned something new, and stuck it back inside his robe. Then they both whipped their wands out of their sleeves into their hands, yelled _'Not so fast, Missy!' _and were just about to in collaboration produce a very dark killing curse. Having not made it very far Petunia turned around and saw a red light coming her way. Too shocked to think or move, she just froze on the spot, unable to look away. Then another ray of magic came from behind her, faster than the red one, and knocked both the masked figures unconscious. They fell into a pile on top of each other and their wands rolled towards a manhole and fell through the iron bars, silently sploshing when they hit the water beneath. The red light vanished just when it was about to hit it's designated target. Turning around, Petunia saw a boy pale as moonlight and eyes to match grumpily sticking his wand up his sleeve.

"Did you knock them out?" she asked him, somehow intrigued that he had the same taste in fashion as the wizards that had tried to torture her.

"Well, uhm" For some reason, Reggie couldn't decide whether to fold his arms authoritatively or stick them in his pockets. "Don't mention this to anybody or I'll be in serious trouble. In fact, no, it wasn't me" He eventually settled on simply letting his arms hang by his sides.

Petunia brushed some blonde locks from her face that some wind insisted looked better there.

"Why would you get in trouble for it?"

"I don't like muggles, ok!" Reggie didn't know why he was talking to this girl instead of simply turning back. Perhaps it was because he so rarely spoke his mind to anybody he just couldn't stop himself when he got the chance, or perhaps he was just excited to put somebody down for a change, when normally he was the one that was put down by others. "I mean" he went on. "I don't want them to be tortured and killed, I just want them to be shipped somewhere, to Russia for example" Reggie groaned, internally reproaching his own inability to act threatening. So what if he wasn't big on the killing, that didn't mean he needed to excuse himself to a stupid muggle. He had always found acting intimidating so difficult and he hated himself for it. "Now go and never come back, you… you muggle freak you!"

The light rain turned into snowflakes. Petunia turned up the collar of her suede coat.

"Fine" she said. "I'm sorry you were embarrassed by a muggle as a child. Bye"

Aware that he couldn't let a muggle have the last word, yet unable to come up with a response, Reggie let himself be pressed against a shop window when Petunia swept by him

"I've never been…" he said. "I wasn't…"

Petunia spun around. "Yes you were"

"No I wasn't!"

"You _so _were"

"No I wasn't!" Reggie was all too aware of what a grateful victim raising his voice indignantly made him, but he had never learned to successfully curb his hellish temper. "How would you know? When was it, because I don't remember!"

"I don't know" Petunia shrugged. "When you were on a field trip to a muggle torturing factory?"

"We don't have a factory like that anymore"

"How about when you wandered off and got lost among muggles? Or when your muggle neighbour took your sparkly stick and used it to stir in her wizard's chocolate wizard's milk, from your chocolate cows that milk themselves and crap rainbows"

The sheer arrogance of this muggle was simply appalling. Of course Reggie wouldn't hit a girl, but that didn't mean he didn't want to. It was ok to torture girls and kill girls (if they were muggles, of course) but hitting girls, even if they were muggles, was simply going too far.

"I've never met a muggle in my life, I have you know, until now!" he flared up.

"So, then, why do you- Never mind, don't argue with brainwashed idiots"

Petunia was just about to leave when Reggie whipped out his Calamander, 9, 5 inches, siren brow and pointed it at her. "Obviously" he said, "everything I have been told is true, as meeting you has proven. _Prepare to-_"

"Oh _no!" _Petunia waved her hands in a damsel-ly fashion, "not the sparkly stick that spews feathers and bubble gums and does little actual _use-_"

"I don't know what sparkly sticks you've encountered, but this sparkly stick- I mean wand!- does things that are _so _traumatizing that-"

"Will it tickle me to death?"

Being interrupted mid-sentence always made Reggies' posh blood boil. He couldn't figure out if she was stupidly brave or just ignorant. _Feathers and bubble gums_, he snorted at the thought. As he listened to her scoffing the magical world, challenging him with her mockery, all he could hear was the voices of his peers and superiors urging him on inside his head, reminding him that he had yet to as much as tip a muggle over. And here was his chance to earn some respect for if there was just one muggle who deserved to die, it was this one. But even so, he couldn't settle on a curse. He had tried so many different ones on dummies, but never on anything living so he didn't know yet which one was right for him. Filtering his mind, all the curses he could think of simply felt unnecessarily horrible. That initial desire to kill had faded and now he just wanted to leave her with a warning while all the same not wanting to give the impression that he was too weak to take a life. Eventually he decided.

"_Asphyxiatus!" _He raised the Calamander over his head and gave it a lash as if it was a fishing rod. A rope tied a knot around Petunias' neck and tightened. She sunk down to her knees convulsing. Now her pleading blue eyes weren't so arrogant anymore, and her blond locks not so neat. Unable to speak and breathe she tried desperately to mouth a request for mercy.

"What's that?" Reggie asked scornfully like he had heard peers and superiors ask their dying victims for their amusement, but he failed to gain any amusement for himself by it. Maybe he was doing it wrong? He tightened the rope with a jerk of his wand. "You want me to stop?" Nope, still nothing.

Blue in the face, Petunia nodded.

"You do? Ok, well first you have to say you're sorry"

Very close to passing out from lack of oxygen flow, Petunia tried her best to mouth the words.

"What's that? You _saw _what? What did you _see?" _But instead of feeling any kick of adrenaline from this power play, Reggie just felt like the most horrible person in the world. What was wrong with him?

But apparently that was as low as Petunia was willing to sink, for as a last gesture before she expected her life to end, she just gave him the finger before she blacked out completely. This rude gesture made Reggie very disheartened, because this never happened to his peers and he just couldn't shake that feeling that there was something inherently wrong with him for being unable to challenge his inner sociopath properly. Occupied by his own crestfallenness, he was so close to have his first killing victim right at his sleek bootstraps when he realized that he simply couldn't bear to watch a person die and retracted the curse simply by lacking the willpower to keep it going. The rope untied itself and melted into the glossy cobblestones.

The _Salus Volatilus _charm was manifested in small crystals that woke the unconscious by seeping into their nostrils in a string formation. Petunias' nose started twitching. Then she sneezed. Reggie stepped over her, in sullen spirits intending to catch the next bus to Hogsmead and pretend all of this never happened.

But then she said: "So that's it?"

That whiny voice grated on him. Why couldn't she just _shut up _and leave him alone?

"Go home before I kill you for real" he told her.

Petunia got up on her feet and tidied up her disorganized hair a bit.

"You could never kill anybody" she said.

"_Yes _I _could!"_ One thing that made Reggies' posh blood boil more than being interrupted mid-sentence was being told he didn't have it in him to be a proper villain. Now killing her seemed like a good idea again.

"No you couldn't why else did you stop those other wizards? Killing me because I hurt your feelings would have been disappointing"

Reggie sat down on the curb outside Denebolas' Delights, sadly putting his hands to his cheeks.

"It's no wonder nobody fears me or respects me. I'm such a mollycoddler. Please just go so I can hate myself in peace"

"Oh, come on…"

"Just _don't! _You don't know a _thing _about me! You don't know what it's like to constantly feel like you don't belong, that you're not as great as others and never could be, to constantly be compared to a standard you can never live up to. To always be ignored" So what if he was confessing to a muggle, he had lost his pride so many times he wondered if he had ever had any, so it hardly mattered at this point. Petunia shook her head at him and joined him on the curb.

"_I _don't know what that's like? Try living with a prissy miss perfect that steals all your friends with her stupid magic tricks. Like, that was _very _impressive of you to win a magical lottery, you dumb…" Had Petunia had a tomato in her hand it would have become tomato sauce at this point. "Pisses me off that everybody wants to see her and nobody ever wants to see me. And if you tell anybody how you feel, you're told to grow up and get over it"

"I know. Congrats on making it out into the world first, the grand prize is higher expectations and a bigger room, the other one doesn't really matter!"

As they sat there venting their hatred Reggie began to feel more enlivened than he had in a long time. "So I thought that if I joined this really evil group, that it would prove that I, too, have balls, that I was capable of things. But I couldn't even finish _you _off, and you were asking for it"

They sat quietly moping for a moment when Petunia suddenly had an idea.

"Oh! Oh! You know what we should do?" she said.

"What? What?"

Petunia expressed her devious proposition in a whisper drowned out for any potential eaves-dropping by a howling wind.

Not a lot could be seen from the rooftops on Knockturn Street except for other rooftops and the tallest building of Diagon Alley; Big Ken.

Sometime after Reggie had showed up and knocked out the Death Eaters and before he had tried to strangle Petunia to death, Sirius had in a fit of boredom directed his binoculars towards the windows at Collater Street that ran in parallel with Knockturn Street after the corner of his eye had caught something of repulsively interesting.

"Don't you think you should pay a little more attention to what's going on?" Remus asked, ever so often looking up from Albert Camus' _The Plague, _the book the book club was reading this week,to look down at the streets below.

"We are paying attention to what's going on. Take them! Take them you sissy!" Sirius tried to force the binoculars onto James, but he promptly refused to take them.

"No I don't want to see a pair of hundred year olds get it on so stop it!"

"You looked for a full ten minutes before you realized they were elderly. You look more, since you find ancient coitus so sexy"

Peter had left some ten minutes ago after Sirius had made him look at his grandparents through the binoculars.

"If you want me to hold them while you go and think about them behind the chimney I can do that but if you make me see another second of that freak show I will kill you" said James.

"That is so immature. The elderly are people with needs too and one day you will be just like them. Oh God what are they doing _now?! _Eeeew!"

"Give me!"

The cupid arrows that they had brought were unnoticeably carried away by the wind to another part of town. Well, not unnoticeably, but Remus wasn't going to point it out.

"Oh, _now _you suddenly want them?" said Sirius, suddenly refusing to share the binoculars.

"I just want to see what it is that could possibly disgust you, for potential revenge plotting" said James, taking the binoculars and putting them to his spectacles. He couldn't even take two seconds of the scene before the glass cracked from the horror. He threw the binoculars on the ground and screamed for eye-wash. Sirius picked them up.

"Now you're just being overly dramatic"

"So… so… dark. Where did the light go? Same image… over and over… over and over… OVER AND OVER- Ow!"

A sharp binocular-y pain hit James in the back of his head, curing his post-traumatic blindness and he could now see poorly again.

"_Now _they're looking up" Remus stepped away from the eaves to not be seen and looked at his stop-watch. "And it only took them-"

"You know what you need?" said Sirius, steering Remus to the other side of the roof and shoving the binoculars onto his eyes. "Now's a good time to take notes"

Remus fenced with his arms frenetically trying to free himself from Sirius and the binoculars that were forced onto his tightly shut eyes. When elbowed in the ribs, Sirius let go at last. Remus bid them both a good night before disapparating.

"Whatever happened to that thing we came here for anyway?" James asked.

Sirius crossed back to the other side of the rooftop and looking down at the place of the set-up, and up and down the street, he saw that both Reggie and Petcemetery had gone.

"I must have worked out. They must have gotten a room somewhere"

"Or they said: 'you were set up too?' and went their separate ways"

Then they spent another ten minutes forcing each other to watch the activities behind the broken blinds.


	4. Cartographers' Guild

Always Purée

Part 4: Cartographers' Guild

Reggie and Petunia met again at Petunias' house the next day after school to discuss their revenge plan. Watching her cross entire rooms to get things was the oddest thing to Reggie, he kept wanting to ask why she didn't accio them. He felt slightly uncomfortable sitting at her desk. Last night Petunia had been somebody that shared his inferiority complex and she had made him really excited to come up with a scheme to extract revenge, but now she was just a girl he didn't know well and he just wasn't good at socializing.

"Do you play anything?" she asked, sitting on her bed and strumming on a ukulele.

"The cello" Reggie replied.

"That's classy"

"Why do you ask?"

"It could be useful when we participate in the Song for Europe Contest!" Petunia grinned.

"The what?"

"The Song for Europe Contest! It's a pan-European contest where every European nation sends a performer and then you vote for a winner and the winner gets… A trophy or something, possibly also money but I'm not sure"

"I thought we were going to plot revenge"

"Yes, but hear me out. If we participate in this thing we will become famous. And then we will slander your brother and my sister in the press! People will _listen _and take us seriously!"

"Slander?"

"It's not even slandering because we will tell the truth about everything they ever did to make us feel like crap. Or do you have a better idea?"

"I looked up some available towers where we could lock them up and have beasts guard them and then we could make them do demeaning things"

"Aha…" Petunia patted her ukulele. "But what would _we _really get out of that? My way we will also become famous and we won't have to get day jobs ever"

Although that was a good point, Reggie had always nurtured a fantasy to lock Sirius inside a tower guarded by beasts and was a little disappointed at Petunias' lack of interest. Perhaps he could arrange that some other time.

"How do you win, then?" he asked.

"First we record a song and send it in, and once it's been accepted the rest will work itself out"

"Ok that sounds easy enough"

"So let's just start writing a song now!"

"Ok"  
Then they just sat there quietly, simply waiting for that hit to write itself.

Hogwarts had a music room where bands like to jam, a room Reggie always passed on his way to the dungeons. He had left the unfruitful songwriting session in Swansea sometime after six without having come up with as much as a first line or title because he wanted to be back before curfew, promising Petunia he'd try to get some drafts written before their next meeting. He didn't normally stop and listen at the door to the music room when a jamming session was in progress, but hearing the upbeat tune that was currently playing, a tune that was clearly heavily influenced by The Who's _My Generation, _it suddenly struck him how easy song writing seemed although it wasn't remotely easy. He put his ear to the door to catch the lyrics.

"_Don't hate me because I'm beautiful, because I'm beautiful baby. Why don't you just walk away? Buy a soap and don't hate me because I'm beautiful"_

And so forth. Everybody was familiar with the shallow lyrics of the _Cartographers' Guild _because they always performed at ceremonies that preceded the holidays. Even the band name was stupid because what did cartography have to do with music? But shallow lyrics aside, it was still catchy as hell. Wondering why it was so much easier for some to come up with songs than others, an idea crossed Reggie's mind: what if he _stole _it? He would have a song that would appeal to the shallow minds of the masses for that contest and Sirius would just hate him for it. But then he thought that he could write deeper songs for sure and didn't need a dumb rip-off of _My Generation. _Then he thought that just possessing depth wasn't enough to make you skillful at songwriting. Reggie was simply too brooding to come up with something happy-sounding.

"Do it!" His bad shoulder angel popped up at his left with a cracking sound. "Just imagine his reaction when _you _get all the fame and glory!"

"Don't" The sound of a heavenly chorus accompanied the arrival of his good shoulder angel. "You will only feel guilt afterwards and you know it"

"Why should you feel guilty for it?" argued the bad angel. "He already has enough fortune and success! You deserve some too, damn it!"

"Don't" said the good angel serenely. "Win on your own merits"

"Don't forget that this is about revenge" the bad angel reminded him. "Remember when he fed your parakeets to his cats just because you accidentally stepped on Satellite's tail? Or the time he threatened to drop your house elf from the roof unless you finished an entire tub of blancmange? Or the time he replaced your shampoo with mayonnaise?"

Of course Reggie remembered all the abuse he had ever been put through and how proud his parents had been over their budding villain, and how they had reprimanded Reggie for crying about it.

"Forgive and forget" said the good angel. "He's not so bad now"

"Meaning he couldn't care less about you" said the bad angel.

"Stop fueling the negative thoughts, Bad Angel!" reproached the good angel.

"It's my _job!"_

"Stealing is wrong. Don't steal"

"It's not wrong. Did you know the Indians don't have words for 'yours' and 'mine'?"

"It's immoral"

"You're immoral"

"You can both go away now" said Reggie, brushing the angels from his shoulders and wondering if there'd ever come a day when they wouldn't meddle in his decision making.


	5. A Song For Cas

Always Purée

Part 5: Song For Cas

If being messy was a sport the residents of dormitory M in the Gryffindor tower would unquestionably be the unbeatable world champions. There wasn't a single piece of floor unoccupied by a lone sock, lose change, squashed cans, candy wrappings, exam results, banana peels that had failed to hit the rubbish bin, chunks of cat hair, at least Reggie assumed it was cat hair, the list went on. Maggots crawled on the wall in the corner. Not even the _ceiling _was clean; it was covered in pieces of toast, presumably attached there with jam, and it was clear that the lads that lived here had at some point thought that it wasn't fun enough to just toss the toast at the ceiling in a random pattern; that it would be more fun to form a draughts pattern by alternating burnt pieces with undercooked ones. Messiness turned into art, ruined by mold. A house elf hadn't set foot here in years by the looks of it. It was sometime after lunch and Reggie was free for two hours due to independent studies, and here was also plenty of inspiration for that science project he was really supposed to be working on right now. Here several sparkly clean tanks with aquatic creatures stood in sharp contrast with the dirty world on the other side of the glass. He flinched when a battered old cupboard he swore he recognized from the _Antiquing's Digest _one of his roommates subscribed to started shaking violently. And then there was a birdhouse. A birdhouse inside a dorm. So anticlimactically weird compared to everything else. He put his eye to the hole, shuddered and quickly backed away. Then he remembered that time was running and that he needed to just be done with what he had really come for; stealing a tape.

There were plenty of tapes to choose from on the floor, most of them concentrated to the immediate area around Sirius' bed, which he could easily point out because it was covered in cat treats and mirrors. Reggie collected a handful of tapes to choose from, one of which was the _Don't hate me _demo, thinking that perhaps he could just take all of them with him, in case there was a better one or, preferably, a more embarrassing one, when he heard footsteps ascending the stairs outside. Swearing under his breath he looked around himself for somewhere to hide. Under a bed? In the shower? In one of the cupboards- no, not in any of the cupboards. Why would anyone of them come back now when he had checked their schedules so carefully when he had planned this thievery? But why didn't matter. He ran into the bathroom, closed the door behind him and crawled out through the small window and onto the steep brick roof outside. The wind blew hard in his face. He couldn't get further from here, so he would have to wait until he thought it was safe to go back inside. A grey cloud came moving fast towards him, unusually fast and low hanging for a cloud. And it was buzzing, too, buzzing like the swarm of vicious sprites it really was, and the swarm chased him back inside and out of the bathroom.

"Get off! Get off! Get off!" He dropped a couple of tapes fencing away the angry fairies, but they left him the minute they got inside the dorm and flew inside the birdhouse and when Reggie checked his pockets he found that they had taken all of his sickles but left all other change. Now that the chaos was over he saw that it was the short and fat one that had returned because of some mishap in potions judging by the oozing stains on his robes, and he was gawking at Reggie in shock. Reggie picked up the tapes he had dropped and pocketed them. Then he whipped out his wand.

"You didn't see _anything" _

Peter put up his hands and shook his head terrified because Slytherins just scared him more than grandma's baths.

"Because I will kill you if you do" Reggie added just to be on the safe side.

Peter was trembling like mad. Why couldn't Petunia have reacted this way? Now this was a good victim and successfully scaring him really boosted his confidence. Reggie twirled his wand between his fingers and headed towards the door.

"Oh, and before I go" he said. "If it looks like anything is missing, say you ate it. Is that clear?"

Peter nodded submissively. His eyes nearly popped out of their sockets from the panic.

"Good"

Reggie pulled the sheet from the tidiest bed, cut a pair of holes in it and draped himself in the fabric. Then he pushed himself through the door.

The disorderliness of dormitory M was so far gone that if you moved one item it actually became less disorderly. So every time Sirius reached under his bed and found a handful of cigarette butts or a half finished cup of tea that had gone cold several years ago and now had unpleasant things swimming in it and simply threw it over his shoulder, some mold actually disappeared from the ceiling toasts, as if not even the fungi could take it anymore.

He hadn't looked for the tapes that evening; he had simply noticed that some were missing because normally when he threw himself on his bed to solve cross words, he would always feel a discomfort against his back like the princess did with the pea and then reach under his back and remove the tape he was laying on, along with some mirrors and cat treats. One wizard's disorderliness, another wizard's order. But tonight nothing had bugged him. One of the crossword clues had been 'recording parasite' and that's when he had started tidying up under his bed. And while he did that, Remus wondered why his sheet was missing.

"Where's my sheet?" he asked.

James shrugged, not missing anything of his own and could thus unbothered scribble on something quidditch related that none of the other lads understood even after having had the details explained to them several times.

"Where was the last place you had it?" he asked.

"In my bed"

"Hm" James cast a quick glance at the sheet lacking mattress. "Well it's not there"

"No"

A flock of magpies that had nested under Sirius' bed escaped through the half open window.

"Have you looked everywhere?" James asked.

"No" said Remus.

"Well maybe you should try that"

"Ok where should I start do you think?"

"Excuse me for a second" said James and chased away some magpies with his scribbles that were trying to pluck some twigs from his Dark Side of the Moon 2525 for their nest. When they had gone he made himself comfortable again, shoving with his feet the pile of duvet further down the bed, and running a hand over his mattress searching for his pen. "Here's a sheet! Oh wait, it's mine"

"I just don't understand how it could have disappeared" Remus looked inside the bathroom and outside the windows, not expecting to find them there and not doing so either.

"It is indeed mysterious" said James.

"I ate it" said Peter suddenly. Looks were directed at him like cameras on an actor. Even Sirius stopped rummaging under his bed.

"You _ate _my sheet?" said Remus, bringing forth some immature giggles in other parts of the room.

"Yes" said Peter nervously.

"How did you do that?"

"I cut it into smaller pieces"

"If you ate an entire sheet your stomach must hurt like hell"

"Not… anymore"

"You haven't eaten any sheet" said Sirius, getting up.

"Yes I have"

"No because I don't remember making you and who else would?"

"I was hungry. Snape did"

"Why would he make you eat a sheet?"

"So my stomach would hurt" Peter knew his eyes shifted too much for anybody to believe him, but Sirius just scared him more than Slytherins sometimes.

"Whatever, it doesn't…" Remus picked up a pair of circular fabric holes from the floor. "Matter… Did you find your tapes?"

"No, and I know where I put my stuff. _Somewhere!" _Sirius stuck his head under his bed again.

"Well that's weird" said James. "First a missing sheet and then missing tapes. Coincidence?"

"I ate the tapes, too" Peter blurted out. "Snape made me. I thought it was cake. I was dead at the time"

"Where are they?" Sirius asked, getting up again and getting increasingly annoyed and having little patience for blatant lies.

"Passed on"

Sirius jammed his wand against Peter's throat. "Where are they or pain!"

Peter whimpered hysterically. "Your brother took them!"

"Why?"

"I don't know I swear!"

The wand that had kept Peter pinned to the wall was retracted and he sunk down like an accordion from post-terror exhaustion.

Petunia tried a C chord on her ukulele. An album of French ballads she had borrowed from her mother spun on her record player to provide some inspiration. A week had passed since their last meeting and Reggie was very excited about presenting his suggestion, but Petunia presented hers first.

"Now listen to this" she said and turned a few pages in the diary that lied beside her on her bed. After finding the passage she had looked for she strummed a chord. "_Dear diary" _she sang, trying to adjust the pitch after the chord. "_I really like Cas but sometimes I find her so annoying" _Here she switched to another chord. "_I think she's a good person, but she is shallow and not very smart" _Switch chord. "_I know I shouldn't think like this about a friend, but sometimes it just cheeses me off when she acts smug because blokes like her a lot, but" _Switch chord. "_But I think the fact that's she's a slut heeeelps!"_

The song seemed to end there, because Petunia turned back a few pages. Then she tried the same chord progression as before, but to a new set of lyrics.

"_Dear diary" _she sang like before. "_Today my tea was poisoned and when I was holding my presentation a bunch of locusts came out of my mouth." _Switch chord."_That really cheesed me off, and I gave Potter and Black a piece of my mind, but since when do they care. But that's not all that cheesed me off. Another thing that cheeses me off is the way Mac responds when I complain." _Petunia was switching chords between sentences now. _"I wouldn't expect Cas to sympathize with me, but Mac is moral, but she has a kind of _'boys will be boys' _attitude to their behaviour, and that cheeses me off because I want her to side with me when my tea has been poisoned, even if it's harmless, and not make me feel like I'm overreacting! _She complains about everybody, nag, nag, nag…_"_

Petunia turned a couple more pages. Reggie thought that this song was a bit wordy.

"Are you tuning the entire diary?" he asked.

"No, just the parts I think would embarrass her. Now where is it… Aha!" Petunia had to clear her throat a couple of times to stop herself from giggling gleefully. "_Dear diary. I had a dream that I was in the entrance hall when Potter and Hooch (Who just cheeses me off) announced that they were getting married because she was expecting triplets and they were going to name all three Darren. Cas asked if that wouldn't get confusing and I just cried like a baby until I woke up." _Petunia put a lot of feeling into the last paragraph and strummed her ukulele intensely as if she was trying to go for a rock and roll effect.

"Your song is really long" said Reggie.

"That's just the basic idea. I'm titling it _Cheesed Off_"

Petunia put her ukulele beside her. "Ok what have you got?"

Reggie hadn't been sure if Petunia had a cassette deck so he had brought one with him. The _Don't Hate Me _demo was already inside so all he had to do was to push the play button. Petunia seemed to enjoy its' upbeat quality. Reggie pressed the stop button.

"You know" said Petunia. "We really need a _winning _song. I've been thinking, perhaps we should try to go with a ballad?"

"I think I nicked a ballad or two" Reggie searched among the tapes he had brought.

"Something _really _profound like" And Petunia sang sentimentally: "_Un banc, un arbre, une rue"_

"A bench, a tree, a street?" Reggie didn't care if it was metaphorical, its' supposed profoundness didn't impress him at all.

"Do you speak French?"

"I'm fluent in several classical languages"

It was funny how posh he was, Petunia thought.

"Well perfect, because everybody loves French ballads! But not everybody knows French… Oh, we will just have to do a bilingual number! Yes it's brilliant!"

They spent perhaps another hour brainstorming song ideas, eager to get something done tonight because the song had to be sent in tomorrow.

The weekend rolled around and Lily travelled home with McGonagall's' permission to attend the wedding of a cousin. Nobody seemed to be in the house when she arrived sometime after three o clock. Still freezing from the cold outside she wanted to find her orange cardy with the braid patterns, a cardy Petunia loved to borrow without ever asking first. She didn't even bother looking in her own room first because Petunia would always help herself to her wardrobe while she was away and then keep the items of clothing she liked in her own wardrobe. But the cardy wasn't in her wardrobe, but in a crumpled pile on Petunias' bed. Taking it, Lily found a couple of tapes underneath. And then she saw on the writing desk a cassette deck with a tape inside, so naturally she pressed the play button. Fast guitars and fast drumming. The song sounded like something The Sex Pistols had rejected.

_You're so ugly! You're so ugly!_

And so forth. Those punk songs weren't exactly known for their diverse lyrics. She recognized it from last year's Yule spectacle. Lily began to collect her stolen diaries and wondered why Petunia had these Cartographers' Guild tapes. Then the song ended and the cassette deck played nothing but empty cassette noise for a couple of seconds. Then a new song started playing, a song vastly different from songs like You're So Ugly, Don't Hate Me, Put a Bag Over Your Head, If I Told You To Jump Off A Bridge and other titles that were typical for the CG. This one was slow and restful, and Lily awaited the rude lyrics. But the rude lyrics never came.

_You're so bold, your hair is gold, prettiest in class, oh Cas-_

"Cas?" Lily nearly dropped her diaries. The song could only refer to _the _Cas, because the world was too small for there to be another Cas.

_Your eyes are sky, you're sweet as pie, you are one fine lass, oh Cas-_

Lily stopped the tape, not able to take more of this. Petunias' floor was too dusty for her to roll around on. After having looked through the window, checking for flying pigs, she made a quick duplicate of the tape.


	6. The Curious Case With The Missing Tapes

Always Purée

Part 6: The Curious Case With The Missing Tapes

Professor Cornball who taught classical magic loved to make his students do presentations and he was the sort of professor nobody had any respect for. Last week's Monday he had given classes G6 and R6 a presentation assignment that were due that Friday, but when Friday came and barely a quarter of the class had prepared anything, he had given them the weekend. Now it was once again Monday and after having spent 20 minutes explaining how she had failed to find a frog prince, a witch with large goggles finally thanked the class for listening and withdrew to her seat. Professor Cornball was the only one awake enough to applaud.

"Thank you Miss Goody. Now, who wants to go up next? Come on, I gave you the weekend, Miss Goody can't be the only one who did the assignment!"

Sirius lifted Remus' scribbling hand by the wrist. "I want to go next!" he squeaked.

"I do _not, _and I don't sound like that!" Remus hissed, freeing himself.

"Yes you do"

"Do not"

"Do too"

"Shut up"

"So did you do the assignment?" Professor Cornball asked.

"Uhm… No"

"And why not?"

"_He _didn't do it either!" Remus smacked Sirius, who smacked back.

Professor Cornball was the sort of professor that liked to sit on top of his desk as if he thought it would make him seem progressive.

"So, nobody wants to go up next?" He gazed over his pupils, all of which were pretending to take notes or read or simply looked down pretending they didn't exist.

"Alright" he said. "You get one more week. _Just one! _"

He excused himself and left the classroom to get some things.

"Anyway you did do the assignment so why didn't you go next?" Sirius asked.

"Because it wasn't very good" said Remus.

"Neither was Goody's" said James.

"It would have been a repeat of Goody's. I didn't want to put you through that again, I know how lethal boredom is to you"

"If you go up next I _promise _I won't yawn" said Sirius.

"Why don't _you _go up next?"

"Because I didn't prepare anything. I know, why don't you give yours to me and then I'll do it for you!"

"No, thank you"

"It's ok, I don't mind!" Sirius started searching among Remus' papers, so Remus collected them quickly to protect himself from humiliation.

"What did you write?" James asked, because he thought Remus seemed a little too desperate to keep the presentation from them.

"Nothing. Same as Goody. About how I didn't find any frog prince"

"Did you look?"

"Of course I looked, it was the assignment"

"But you didn't find one"

"No, I didn't find one and also I threw the presentation away anyway so don't bother" Remus shoved his papers in his bag with one hand and kept Sirius away from them with another.

"Here it is" said James, fishing the presentation from the disorderly bunch of notes.

"_Lay off my notes!" _Remus snatched the paper from him, crumpled it together and stuffed it inside his mouth.

"Why would you write something down that is _that _embarrassing?" Sirius asked, but Remus couldn't explain that right now, since he had paper in his mouth.

Professor Cornball returned with a large trolley with glass jars full of frogs and cages full of swans.

"You can divide yourself into groups. Boys take swans, girls take frogs. Yes, Miss McKinnon?"

Mac lowered her hand. "Why do the girls have to take frogs?"

"Because frogs turn into princes and swans turn into princesses"

"Why are princesses never turned into frogs, or princes turned into swans?"

"Yeah!" Cas supported her.

"Because beauty isn't as important to women as it is to men" Cornball explained. "Beauty is the most important component of a woman to a man, a man would never kiss a frog but a woman would"

"Thank you" said Mac, noting down the answer she had received for her query.

"Thank you"

There was a lot of hustle and bustle when students queued to get their transfigured royalty. Cas tapped her pencil against her desk restlessly. Then she snapped it in half.

"Oops!"

"What was that?" Mac asked.

"I need another pencil" Cas got off her chair and straightened her skirt.

"You could easily mend it"

"Excuse me for a moment" Cas squeezed past Mac and Lily and went to the seats on the other side of the classroom, nearly bumping into Peter who had been assigned the task of fetching a swan princess after a quick game of rock, scissors and paper.

"Hello gentlemen" she grinned. "My pencil just broke! Can I borrow one?"

"Can't you ask Cornball?" Sirius asked.

Cas grinned at him like a Cheshire cat, saying nothing.

"What?"  
"Nothing" Cas' grin was so wide her mouth looked ready to fly off her face at any moment.

"Ok then" Sirius went back to sleep.

"Can I just say" Cas pulled his head back up by a handful of his hair, well aware of how sensitive his roots were.

"_Ow _for _f-"_

"That maybe you think you have to play this role of this unfeeling person, to protect yourself from hurt, but-"

James woke up too at this point, and Remus stopped taking notes.

"-but honestly! You don't have to pretend with me! If you're a good person on the inside, _that's ok too!"_

"Ok, well" Sirius rubbed his tender scalp. "Good to know" Then he went back to sleep.

Cas seemed to have more on her chest, 'though.

"What that was about?" James asked.

"Well, I heard that song"

"What song?"

Cas didn't need long to recall the chorus. She spun around, singing a much happier and showy rendition of the slow paced ballad: "_You got spunk! The sass! You're the one, oh Cas!"_

That line was enough to transform James and Remus into Cheshire cats.

"Lily found the tape" Cas explained.

"Did _she _steal them?"

"She insisted she just found them"

"For the record that song isn't about you" said Sirius.

"Oh yeah who is it about?"

Sirius thought for a bit. "Cassandra"

They all glanced at Cassandra who was crawling around on the floor trying to catch an escaped frog. Then they glanced back at Sirius in much disbelief.

"What? There are fetishists! Stop being so shallow!" said Sirius, burying his head in his arms yet again.

"Why can't you just admit it?" Cas asked.

"Why would Evans steal my tapes…?"

"She _found _them!"

"Where?"

"At her house"

"How would they have gotten there if she didn't steal them?"

"If she stole them and brought them home, why would she bring them back?"

Sirius took Remus' pencil. "You wanted a pencil? Take it and go"

"I didn't really come here for a pencil" said Cas. "I just wanted to come over and grin smugly at you because of that sweet, sweet song, in which you proclaimed your love-"

"I hope you don't really believe that, because then you'll only be disappointed"

Cas put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder and said before leaving: "I know. Maybe one day you will dare to love me"

At fourteen and after having sipped on McGonagall's' whiskey, recording a couple of songs Sirius had written as an absurdly infatuated 12 year old had seemed like a really good idea. He had completely forgotten about them and had thought that he had recorded over them, but apparently that was not the case. Once class was over he was going to find that tape and throw it to the squid.

James made a pulling-down motion with his hands. "_You got spunk! The sass! You're the one! OH CAS!"_

"Would you like me to turn one of your cheesy ballads into a show tune right here?" Sirius offered.

James composed himself. "So Reggie stole your tapes, and then Lily finds them at her house. That is indeed curious"

"I know, I just can't figure out what he and Periwinkle-"

"It's Patrinia"

"-would want them for"

"To annoy you somehow?"

"Always so perspicacious"

"More perspicacious than you"

Then Peter returned with an unusually feathery Princess of Lichtenstein and to decide who had to snog the bird first they played rock, scissors and paper, a game Peter had yet to win.


	7. Regpet

Always Purée

Part 7: Regpet

Spring rolled around and the weather shifted from grey and rainy to grey and rainy. Mac stirred in her morning tea.

"Anything interesting in the muggle papers?"

Why Lily wanted to keep up with the happenings of the muggle world was unfathomable even for other mudbloods, but once you got used to the magical world it wasn't really all that different or more interesting and there were things she missed.

"Oh look, they are announcing the participants for the Song for Europe contest!" she said, struggling to keep the large newspaper from folding over itself. "Winona Paris, The Choo Choo Train, Regpet…" She put down the paper.

"I watched that last year" said Cas, buttering a piece of toast very thinly.

"We all did. Together" Mac reminded her.

"Yeah it was fun. I wanted to write a song and send it in but I kind of just forgot about it"  
Strumming her fingers on the table, Lily felt she just had to talk to someone. She pushed the bowl of unfinished cereals away from her.

"Hey Mac, let's go to the library!"

Mac finished chewing and swallowed in her usual, slow pace that induced feelings of inferiority in gobblers. "Can I finish my toast?"

"Bring it!"

"What's the rush?" Cas asked as she watched them both leave their chairs. "Why did you only ask her?"

"Er well you don't like the library, Cas. You think it's boring"

"What are you going there for anyway?"

"Read. Sorry Cas. See you at Charms"

The library was usually empty in the morning, and nothing signaled spring like the growing number of pre-and post-breakfast visitors that were just beginning to realize that they had a lot more memory refreshing to do in preparation to their OWL's and NEWT's than they had thought, and suddenly two months didn't feel like enough time to get ready. But most people weren't that neurotic about exams and would postpone it to the very final weeks, so Lily and Mac didn't need to waste any significant amount of time on finding a private area to chat.

"Well?" Mac asked between bits of toast and flinched at the sound of a squeaky cart.

"Hey, no food in the library!" Pince told her off and waited for Mac to push the remaining bit of toast in her mouth before continuing with her morning routine.

"I read something very interesting in the papers" said Lily, placing the muggle paper on the table so they both could read. "I can't tell Cas, well at least not yet. I mean, she gossips, especially to Fancycurls. I just need your opinion on something"

"And what's that?"

Lily pointed at the paper. "See participant number 3? That's my sister on that photo!"

"Is that Sirius' little brother? Are they a couple or something?"

"I don't even know when they could possibly have met. When did that happen? Actually, I think I know what happened. Black thought: where can I find a muggle girlfriend for my muggle hating brother?"

"And… _he _created Regpet?"

"That's why those tapes were at home. But it was his tape, not Regpet's. No, I get it now"

"Do explain" said Mac, sitting down to do some home work.

"Now I understand why they were listening to that cheesy song! Little Reggie wants to humiliate him. It's the only explanation, they certainly didn't steal it because it was _that _good"

"Can't have been that bad since they made it"

"Yeah, well look at the competition: 'My skirt is a swirlin', 'Ramalamalang', 'Jump and skip my dollie'. Cas said they have a dysfunctional relationship. It all makes sense"

Lily folded the paper, proud of her deductive ability.

"Suppose you're right" said Mac. "Are you going to stop them?"

"I can't think of a reason why. I'm not morally above them performing _Natural Blonde_. Not any of my business, really"

"What's in it for Petunia, 'though? What does she care?"

"I have no idea. Maybe she just wants the fame and money. She's obsessed with money, she wants to marry rich and maybe Reggie is just cute and rich enough to compensate for being a complete abomination"

Lily sat down across the table from Mac, contemplating to do some homework herself since she was there anyway. Mac put down her pen.

"Could it be this revenge plan might also encompass you?" she asked. "You have mentioned it's a bit dysfunctional between you two also"

"How could this affect me in any way?"

"I don't know but I am curious"

Lily could really not see how a stolen song could affect her in any way. The title of the song was taken directly from one of the songs she had heard at home, and it had certainly not had anything to do with her. Petunia had jealousy issues for sure but she didn't have a way to humiliate her. Right? And surely she had enough self-awareness to realize her problem was with her own self-esteem and that it would be completely unfair of her to take it out on Lily just because people happened to like her better. Right? It wasn't as if she had ever done anything to deserve this animosity. Right? At least not on purpose. Right? In any case, Petunia really had nothing to use against her. Right?

"You know" Lily packed her homework again. "Stealing _is _wrong. It doesn't matter if the person you stole from deserved it, it's still wrong"

"Are you going to tell them that?"

"Yeah I'm going to tell them that! I'm going to tell them this instant!"

"Are you going to tell Sirius too?"

"He's never been above stealing, has he?"

"Neither have you"

"That's… That was _completely _different, Mac!"

"You stole Rol's diary"

"It was an accident! If she doesn't want people to accidentally take her diary she should return library books on time!"

Cas sat on her bed holding up her hair to attach the peppermint hairclips she had left charms class for because they matched her finger nails better than her purple, clam shaped ones. Her nose itched. Her dorm was not a place for anybody with allergies; it was full of lazy cats, rescued luminous rabbits from secret army bases, ash samples and perfumes. When she had fixed her hair, she went to the full length mirror by the door to make sure everything matched and to do some final adjustment if necessary. In the reflection she saw on Lily's bed under the German thesaurus a newspaper. Normally Cas would have thought nothing of it, but she was irritated that Mac refused to go into detail about Lily's mysterious absence from Charms class when Cas knew she knew more than she wanted to admit. And nothing put her in prying mood like withheld information. She went to pick up the newspaper and found the answer without having to flick through any pages. If smarts was measured in exam results, Cas wasn't smart, but 10 percent of her thoughts did cover things unrelated to boys and fashion. At first she was appalled that Regpet was performing with not just any stolen song, but one of the songs dedicated to her. And then Lily and Mac had had the nerve to keep it from her, and it wasn't the first time they had kept something from her because they thought she was unable to keep her mouth shut. Clearly it was Sirius they really wanted to keep information from, so Lily could go and make sure she was safe for humiliation while being completely indifferent to his precious feelings. _Well, _Cas thought, _good luck with that. _Then Cas decided she wanted to go with the peppermint hairclips anyway.

A vast selection of sticks and wand cores lied in a tragic mess on Professor Flitwick's desk. Wands were being produced in charms' class today, because in the event that you were disarmed in the wilderness, it was important to know how to put together a temporary wand quickly that could produce the basic survival spells. The whole ordeal with the missing tapes a couple of months ago had been long since forgotten, a couple of months ago to be specific just how long ago it had been forgotten. But for some reason, the slightly faded memory of that embarrassing song chose this moment to resurface.

"_You got spunk, the sass" _Remus hummed unconsciously whilst sandpapering the rough surface of a birch, 7 inches, wood nymph hair.

"_You're the one, OH CAS!" _ James joined in, theatrically singing into his pine, 8 inches, gnome moustache. "Sorry. I had forgotten that song until now"

Sirius looked at him, running the tip of his aspen, 8 inches, troll tail against his lips and thinking to himself: _Why don't I just make a show tune number out of one of his cheesy ballads right here?_

"So, so sorry" James added. "Won't happen again, honest. It's just so catchy, that's all"

Sirius went on to think: _I _am _wearing my tap shoes. Seriously, why not?_

"Honest" James assured him, getting a little scared.

Cas entered the classroom wearing the same hair clips she had left in and neared their desks. Sirius reached her a pencil. "Here you are"

"_I know something that you don't" _Cas sung smugly in a jazzily fashion, taking the pencil just to have something to fiddle smugly with. "_Would you like to know what it is?"_ She mimed dancing with a top-hat, and then jazz hands.

"_No I don't why don't you bugger off?"_

Cas braided her fingers behind her back and bounced restlessly on her toes. _"_Are you sure? It concerns those stolen tapes, if you remember. I know why they were stolen and how it's going to affect you"

"If you know I'm sure I can figure it out somehow"

"You don't even know how I found out. You'd save time hearing it from me"

"Fine, what is it-"

"On one condition!"

Sirius pointed his home made wand at the ceiling. "Pass" A distress rocket broke through the cracked ceiling. The floor above them sunk a little bit and bits of it rained down.

"Oh, come on" said Cas, brushing bits of ceiling off her.

"Fine, what condition?"

Cas hadn't actually expected him to go along with it. Now she had to come up with something good. _Slave for a week? Marriage? Her make-up kit back? _

"Hm" She put a finger to her mouth.

"You don't even _have _a condition?"

"So hard to choose!"

"Choose all of them" said James, stuffing the hole in the ceiling with leaves and mud.

"Nuh uh, she said _one _condition. That was the agreement" said Sirius.

"Yeah well she has the upper hand, does she not?"

"Of course she can have as many conditions as she wants but then I will definitely pass"  
Cas put her hands to her chest sympathetically. "It's going to be _so _embarrassing for you. My heart is already breaking for my baby"

"Aw. How about if you tell me what you know you get to hear the other song I wrote for you?"

"There's another song?"

"_Cassie, Cassie, when will those clouds disappear?"_

Cas looked positively ready to melt.

"That's _Angie" _said James.

Cas looked a little less ready to melt.

"But _Cassie _sounds better" said Sirius. "I sometimes like to replace girl names in songs with _Cassie"_

The readiness to melt in Cas grew. James withdrew from the conversation to stuff the hole in the ceiling with some more leaves.

"_Cassie won't you come out tonight? Why don't you come out? Put that red dress on-"_

Everybody knew that Cas was a disgrace to the female gender. A song by _Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons _reworked to be about her worked better on her than the _Leggus Melticus _charm. Literally. She was slowly shrinking into the puddle remains of her shoes.

"Ok, I'll be the one to say it" said James, re-entering the conversation. "Don't back down from making the condition good just because he reworked a cheesy song. You know, men are fleas on rats and other things your girl friends should be saying and not me.

"But-but-but" Cas began to sound like a fish, what with her face being in the melted puddle of her former self.

"Stop making your gender look bad! Yeah, that's what Lily would say if she was here. But she's not so I'll just fill in for her. She can thank me later"

"I _am _wearing my tap shoes" said Sirius. "And you're one to talk about making your gender look bad"

"_Me?"_

"You and Evans can't be in a room together without it ending with you getting some kind of injury because you wanted to show off"

"Removing that moth nest was detention, not showing off"

"No, you were showing off. Then you got detention. Then you showed off some more. It's blokes like you that make girls think that all they have to do to get a boy to do what they want is to bat their eyes a little and pretend to drop pencils. Sexists the lot of them!"

"_You're _the one who makes your gender look bad. It's blokes like you that make girls think that boys are only interested in one thing"

"I guess that is unfair. You're interested in _two _things, aren't you?"

Having decided on a condition at last, Cas picked herself up from the puddle. It was quite a sight to behold. She clapped her hands for attention.

"I have to decide on a condition. You have to write me a new, completely original song"

"Fine"  
Cas scribbled the mysterious symbols of the _On-One-Condition _charm on a napkin. Then after she had plucked a hair from Sirius's sensitive head and rolled it in the napkin she set it on fire. It turned into a shriveling pile of ashes in an instant. Excusing herself, she went to ask Mac for some kind of container to keep the ash in and returned with a zip lock bag.

"Ok" she said, scooping the ashes into the zip lock bag and sealing it. "You know the Song For Europe contest?"

"No"

"It's a muggle contest and it's broadcasted on television and everything. And it turns out that a little duo called _Regpet _are performing with a little ditty called _Natural blonde. _It may not feature my name, but, well, Cassandra doesn't have blue eyes"

"Janine does"

"I just hate that _nothing _rhymes with 'Dorcas'"

"Orcas" Remus didn't know why he had said it. He usually carefully considered the pros and cons of opening his mouth before doing so but being distracted by chopping wood he had just forgotten about it. Cas's warm smile grew cold in an instant. Remus reached inside his bag for _The ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha _discretely.

"Dorcas you're like the orcas" said James.

"Dorcas put down the fork-as" Sirius reached for the nearest paper with available writing space but Cas took what he found tore it to pieces angrily.


	8. The Song For Europe Contest

Always Purée

Part 8: The Song For Europe Contest

Saturday night came and the outtakes for the Song for Europe contest were on. The duo that formed Regpet was nervously awaiting their turn. They couldn't see the young woman that was singing and swirling her skirt on stage, but they could hear her:

_My skirt is a-swirlin', my skirt is a-swirlin', my skirt is a-swirlin', dance, dance, dance!  
_After precisely two minutes of skirt swirling, she finished with the elongated words: _Get up and dance!_

The rustling sound of applause filled the studio. _Thank you Miss Winona Paris, _they heard the host say. _Now put your hands together for the duo _Regpet _with _Natural Blonde!

Applause filled the studio again.

"Maybe we should have gone with _Sweet as pie" _Reggie thought, feeling sick.

"Come on we have to get out there!" said Petunia, trying to drag Reggie with him but he held back.

"I have to take something for my nerves" he said.

"Ok, but hurry!"

The bathrooms were two seconds away and Reggie had brought a bottle of Nervkill with him, so he was sure he'd make it on time. And he would have, had he not been met by a pair of unfamiliar wizards in blue robes and his parents. 

"What's going on?" he asked, wondering how they had found him, and really embarrassed to be wearing a blue, velvet suit with a frilly, white shirt underneath.

"It's ok" said his mother, clearly finding it hard to look at him in the colorful outfit he was in. "You're safe now"

She put her hand to her mouth. Perhaps if she ate she would have thrown up.

"What?"

The figures in the robes grabbed Reggie by his arms.

"You're getting help" said his father although he didn't sound all that concerned for his well being. "You're going someplace safe"

"I still don't understand"

"Mr Magot and Miss Yarrow are from Pureness Pride Limited" his mother explained. "They have a camp for young wizards and witches who are a little, shall we say, lost"

"I'm not lost! I hate muggles honestly! I can't go to any camp I have school!" Reggie had heard of those camps and it was far from going on a holiday. He absolutely did not want to go, not just because of their shady methods but also because it was unnecessary and he would be mocked ruthlessly by his peers if they ever found out someone like _him _needed purity camp.

"They have a school at the camp" said his mother. "And if you're not lost, how come you have formed a duo with a mudblood and are performing in a mudblood contest?"

"It's a revenge thing! I was going to get revenge and then I was going to kill her! I was going to make it really gruesome and everything!"  
"Well then just consider camp a holiday then. You have nothing to lose and we get some peace of mind"  
"'_Nothing to lose'?" _Nothing that was of any worth to his parents, maybe. "I don't want to!"  
"Stop behaving like a child! Guards seize him!"  
"We already have, madam" said Magot.

"Guards take him away!"

"We're not actually _guards, _madam-"

"_Just get him out of here!"_

Magot and Yarrow bowed and disapparated with Reggie.

After five minutes of listening to the host tell light bulb jokes to the audience, a festively dressed woman with a clipboard came and told Petunia that Regpet had been disqualified and left to escort the next participants, _Kenny & the Chickens, _to the stage.

"He'll show up!" Petunia yelled after her. "One more minute!"

But the host was already apologizing for the unexpected disqualification and introduced the next group with a joke about the importance of being on the clock he immediately apologized for when he realize it would upset parents of small children nationwide.

_I am so sorry, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway, here is _Kenny & the Chickens _with _My heart says cluck, cluck, cluck.

_Stupid wizards, _Petunia thought and kicked the wall. _Bailers, the lot of them! _

Triumphant laughter woke her from her internal rage.

"Ha ha!" said Lily, waving her pointing fingers like pretend-guns. "Take _that, _Regpet!"

"What are _you _doing here?"

"I stopped your revenge plan! I bet you thought doing a spoken word rendition of my diary entries would be _really _clever, _well-"_

"You did something? What did you do? Did you lock him up somewhere?"

Magic ability aside, Petunia was taller than Lily and she could twist arms really hard, and using magic against a muggle was extremely unfair (but then, so was twisting the arms of those shorter than you.)

"Lock him up? No, I showed the producer a naughty version of your song"

"That's not why we were disqualified. We were disqualified because Reggie did what you wizard scum do best and bailed on me!"  
Lily ceased her victorious finger pointing. "I thought finishing all the cereal was what us wizard scum do best"

"The list is getting rather long, I grant you that"

Petunia threw her pink feather boa in Lily's face and shoved her out of her way.

The lobby in the BBC building had a television. A man in a chicken suit waddled around the stage making only chicken sounds while a trio of beautiful chorus girls kept shortening their skirts with every key change.

"I could never write a song like that" said Peter.

"Would you want to?" Remus asked.

"Uhm… no?"

"Who got them disqualified?" Sirius asked, disappointed that he hadn't gotten to do the honours. "I wanted to be the one to ruin everything"  
As if they didn't have enough mysteries to ponder, the doors to the lift opened and Lily stepped out of it and passed through the lobby on her way out.

"Evening gentlemen" she greeted them politely.

"Madam" they greeted back.

"Are you sure you don't want to hear the rest of Kenny & the Chickens?" Remus asked her.

"Hm, pass"

_Suit yourself, _thought the gentlemen and turned their attention back to the television. The chorus girls were down to their knickers, now. They weren't actually in their knickers, but their shorts were so short they could have been knickers. Knickers would probably have covered more, the gentlemen thought in sync.

"Oh, perhaps I should mention, _I _didn't get them disqualified" said Lily.

"Nobody thought you did" Sirius yawned.

"Yes, somebody beat me to it _too"_

"Any clue of who beat you?" James asked.

"Reggie's cold feet perhaps? Good night"

There was enough of that long feather boa for a couple of more neck warming layers.


	9. Moo-Ma And Moo-Pa Again

Always Purée

Part 9: Moo-Ma And Moo-Pa Again

The following Sunday offered sunshine and blue sky. Birds chirped in the still trees, trying to attract a mate. Captains were pushing each other in the chest on very slippery grass.

"We booked the pitch!" Not three minutes into the argument and Moran who captained the Slytherins was already growling.

"We were here first" James explained to Moran yet again as if he was mentally challenged. He knew Slytherins were very thick (and not rarely actually mentally challenged, what with all the inbreeding) and needed simple things explained to them several times and tried not to judge them too harshly for it anymore.

"Maybe you didn't hear. We _booked _it. Actually _booked _the thing, like we all have to do!"

"Yeah, well, we were here first, so"

Another Slytherin had to hold Moran back when he looked ready to become violent with his wooden bat.

"You've already been temporarily expelled once, Merak" he said.

"We booked it too" said Steve. "I mean, I _was _going to book it"

"It doesn't matter" James told him."As long as you show up first-"

"YES IT DOES!" Moran tried to free himself from his restrainer, promising to not smash anybody's skull in. "_We booked it!"_

"_So did we! Almost!"_

The restrainer let Moran and James try to wrestle down the other to the muddy ground.

"Where's your seeker?" Rol asked Slab.

"On _holiday!" _ Slab replied, articulating exaggeratedly.

"On holiday where?"

Slab looked at her as she was mentally challenged. "Why would _we _tell _you _anything?"

It was better to demonstrate how, unless Slab wanted a snitch jammed up an unwanted orifice, it was better if he just talked when told to than to just tell him to do so, because showing was always more powerful than telling.

So Sirius had been spared from humiliation the night before, and even if he hadn't, it wouldn't have been that big of a deal. But he still didn't want those tapes to be in the possession of somebody who had major issues with him and who might try to use them another time if the perfect opportunity arose. But he couldn't find the tapes anywhere, not in Reggie's dorm after having searched it so carefully nor anywhere else, and what was even stranger was that Reggie seemed to have vanished completely from the grounds as well.

When the map wasn't rotating between its makers or misplaced somewhere or used as an umbrella or blanket (because the full size of it was impressively large and had even served as a tent once), it hung in the corner of a wall in the dorm, disguised as a serious infestation problem. Since they spent a lot of time prying in other dorms (and because they were far from short on enemies), they had to expect unwanted pryers, and they thought that instead of keeping the map in the drawers protected by protective charms that could be broken by anybody with enough determination, they hung it in plain sight, arranged it to mirror whatever the unauthorized viewer found to be most disgusting, which was usually maggots.

Sirius had just reverted the map to its illusory state and pinned it back to the wall when he heard that sound that could best be described as umbrella being turned inside out in strong wind, that sound that often signaled apparition or umbrellas being turned inside out. He turned around and two wizards in blue robes seized him instantly by his arms.

"You're coming to take me away ha ha?"

"Hello Sirius. How are things?" His mother was doing her hair like the evil queen from Sleeping Beauty again and when she spoke she looked like she had had reconstructive surgery to keep her face from cracking from internal hatred.

"Fine. Weren't you going to disown me or something?"

"Oh… _that!" _Watching her fail to as much as fake a smile was painful. She just looked like she was about to sneeze. She gave up trying when it wasn't working and thought it was best to stick to cold. "That was just a threat" she said. "You are, in spite of everything, our… you know"

Saying that much seemed to cause her worse internal pain than a burst appendix and had Sirius not had two blue-cloaked strangers clinging to his arms he would have made her a medal for the brave effort. Perhaps she had finally found some anti-depressants that were working for her.

"Everything is going to be ok if you let these wizards help you" said his father. If his mother was an ice queen, then his father was way beyond the absolute zero of a thermodynamic temperature scale, possessing the kind of unfathomably impossible coldness scientists were still theorizing about. Next to him his mother always seemed a little less horrible (Kind of like how Satan seemed a little less horrible than Hitler to most people), and whenever Sirius saw him he always tried to picture him in a green frock but that just made him scarier. Even the Silver Sprites seemed afraid to come out of the birdhouse to nick his buttons.

"You're in a safe place" said his father.

"I have wands jammed into my sides so I don't feel particularly safe" said Sirius.

"You're going to purity camp" said his mother.

"Oh. I think it's a little late for that"

"We were just going to sign up Reggie, but then they had this 2 for 1 offer so we thought maybe there's hope even for you"

"Alright. Guards take me away!"  
"How good of you to be so cooperative. We thought you'd put up a lot of resistance"

"Don't mention it"

Apparition didn't just sound like umbrellas being turned inside out in a strong storm, it felt like it too.


	10. Purity Pride Camp

Always Purée

Part 10: Purity Pride Camp

It was sometime after lunch and a broken grandfather clock sat quietly in the corner of a room. Young participants chatted nervously amongst themselves, awaiting the lecturer. Purity Pride Ltd. had a couple of years back bought an old mental asylum on Liberty Cap Island just south of Wizard's Plymouth that hadn't been in use since St Mungos opened their much more strictly regulated brain ward, and here the confused youths were to stay until they were cured of their virtuous thoughts of tolerance and compassion. A fat man carrying a slide projector pushed himself through the door and began preparing for his lecture, a couple of times asking his audience if anybody knew how to operate a slide projector, how you turned it on, how you plugged it in and so forth and every time a tech savvy volunteer rushed to his aid, the rest of them cursed the show off internally. Everything worked within ten minutes and the fat man who had introduced himself as Mr. Stevens began his seminar.

"You all know why you're here" he said. "You're all feeling lost and confused. You know why? Because of liberal propaganda! Those liberals make you fight your natural urge to _kill all the dirty muggles!_" He breathed deeply a couple of times. "But you're safe here. Here you will be reminded of why all muggles deserve to die painfully"

Mr. Stevens pressed the on button of the projector and picked up the small remote and began showing gory pictures from the Spanish Inquisition and medieval witch hunts on the projector screen. "Photographic evidence from the Middle Ages, you can't fake that! Now then. The liberals wonder why we can't all just get along and live in peace and harmony side by side. There was a time when we tried to do that and this is what happened! We got _burned! _Burned and driven into hiding!_"_ Mr. Stevens paused rhetorically like all those dare-to-speak classes had taught him, showing some more slides under silence. "The liberals will tell you that it was a long time ago and that the inquisitors were just a few bad eggs. Yes it was a long time ago because they haven't found us since and they would kill us all if they knew we were still around!"

Mr. Stevens nodded a lot during his rhetorical pauses as if he thought it would run the point home efficiently. "Their weapons may be different from ours" A couple of nods. "But they have them" A couple more nods. "Can anybody tell me why we have to hide from the muggles?" He nodded twice until he realized that a question wasn't an argument. "Anybody? Come on, don't be shy! Yes you there, what's your name?"

A platinum blonde boy with radiantly white teeth in a magenta cardy stood up. "Uh, Roy, Sir-"

"What did you want to say, Roy?"

"I was told it's because they will want our cures or… something. And they can't have it because it's bad for them or… something"

"Thank you, Roy" said Mr. Stevens and Roy sat down again. "Yes, the liberals will tell you that we are hiding for _their _sake! Nothing about that makes sense, and that's because that is not at all why! It's not because we don't have enough elixir, or that our solutions are bad for them and that we want to play God! It's because they will kill us if they find us! We can't get along, and we have gotten the short end of the stick from that fact!" Mr. Stevens showed a couple more slides under a rhetorical pause, every so often glancing at his audience to nod some.

Roy was sitting next to Reggie and leaned closer to him to whisper.

"I've seen you around in the library. I've noticed you like to frequent the DADA section"

"I thought there'd only be Slytherins here" Reggie whispered back. "And people from pro-purity houses in other schools"

"I'm Ravenclaw myself. What do you think of this so far?"

Reggie shrugged. "I guess it makes sense. I don't need this. I'm already very proud and hateful"

"Then why were you sent here?"

"My parents caught me forming a duo with a mudblood. I _was _going to kill her afterwards!"

"Maybe you'll get to leave sooner"

"What about you? Are you anti-purity?"

Roy shrugged. "I think living in invisibility is a fair compromise. Kind of like at the zoo. Do they keep lions and tigers together? No, they separate them. They don't kill one of them. Not a big deal"

"But what about all those victims on those medieval polaroids?"

Roy reached inside his coat for some gum. "There are mudbloods I like. Gum?"

"No thank you"

Roy stuck a piece of gum in his mouth and put the rest back inside his coat. "It's kind of like that story from the Good Book. Have you accepted Christ as your lord and saviour by the way?"

"What?"

"There were two cities called Sodom and Gomorra and they were full of gays so the Lord sent two angels to destroy the cities, lest they found just one person who wasn't full of sin or something. Well ok, in the story they didn't. My point is, there are some mudbloods I like, and I guess that's why I'm not desperate to kill them all. Kind of the reversed, my story. So have you accepted Christ as your lord and saviour?" Roy blew a bubble until it popped. Mr. Stevens went up to him and demanded he spit the gum in his hand.

The map was large, seemingly never ending with not only its visible floors and rooms but also its hidden floors and rooms, and on top of that was the print very tiny. But the trained eye could always quickly single out where any given person was and who was missing and anything unusual as if through intuition rather than observation.

"I'm telling you he's vanished" said James. He and Remus had been lying on the floor in the dorm unfolding unchecked flaps for the past ten minutes. Peter wasn't present because he had extra tutoring in Transfiguration.

"I heard you the first time" said Remus, unfolding yet another flap.

"I'm _telling _you he's _vanished"  
_"Got any theories?"

"First his brother is holidaying at Liberty Cap Island and now this"

"Roy is there too. That island is known to have a purity camp"

"How do you get there?"

"To the island? You get there from Plymouth. To the camp I don't know. They want to keep that secret for obvious reasons"

"Are you saying that to get there we will have to pretend to be campers and get into all sorts of silliness?"

"He's only been away for a couple of hours. Don't you think he can take care of himself and doesn't need rescuing like some damsel?"

"No I think he's a total damsel"

They spent perhaps another hour unfolding flaps just to make sure they had gone over precisely every area.

After three hours of an uninterrupted showing of gory images and rhetorical pauses the campers were allowed to get some fresh air and stretch their legs outside the old asylum.

"I thought about that story" said Reggie. "They did end up destroying those cities, right?"

"Yes but they wouldn't have if this bloke had found one person that was worth rescuing" Roy replied.

"Right, but they _didn't"_

"No, but _if-"_

"So we should all not kill muggles just because _you _like a couple of them? Who decides who gets to decide anyway?"

"Why, that would be God. You have to be very righteous to get chosen"

"Lots of people must have disagreed with having their city burned. Does that make it wrong?"

"No"

"Well then"

Roy searched his pockets for a packet of fluorine cigarettes. Unlike muggle cigarettes they did not ruin your teeth and give you bad breath. He stuck one in his mouth and lit it with his elm, 9 inches, yeti gum and blew a ring. Reggie really enjoyed chatting with him because he was so outgoing and not put off by his timidity. Then a ring of floo smoke flew over the fluorine smoke ring, like a large fish catching a small fish, dooming Reggie to spend the rest of his stay as a wall flower.

"Hello Roy" said Sirius. He had arrived some time before the break and was puffing floo powder as usual, not only because it was stronger but also because he could find it all over Hogwarts by every fire place.

Roy beamed. "You got sent here too?"

"Sure was"  
"You don't seem too bothered by it"

"Let them try. Can't wait to see them fail"

"I sure hope I can resist too"

"What do they do, anyway? Show those hypnotic spinny thingies and electroshock you for good thoughts?"

"So far they've just shown pictures of burn victims"

Sirius was a little disappointed. Then he thought that he probably ought to acknowledge Reggie because he was looking so uncomfortable and kept glancing at the door as if he really wanted to go inside.

"Are you enjoying yourself so far?"

"Yes I am"

"Good"  
Sirius always seemed so annoyingly unencumbered. Reggie wondered if he was here to just get out of school or if he wanted to do drugs in a place he hadn't done drugs before and if he was going to preach to him or just ignore him as usual. The latter seemed more likely because now he was chatting merrily about assignments and common acquaintances with Roy again. Reggie had hoped for some preaching if just for a chance to put him on the spot.

"Do you know why muggles can't know we exist?" he asked when they were both temporarily silenced by the smoking.

"Can't they?" Sirius asked.

"If they can, why are we hiding?"

"Are we?"

"Well _yeah!"_

"I never noticed"

Ok, so he could put on a pretend-act of not being preachy if he wanted to. Reggie wasn't going to be fooled that easily, it would take a little more than playing dumb to fool him.

Evening began to fall and it was ridiculous how boring everything seemed when Sirius wasn't around as if he was some kind of Messiah for the Bored, taking on the boredom of the world to spare everybody else from boredom. Truly had he suffered so much boredom more nobly than anybody could ever have imagined. Even the library, which he always complained was boring although Remus wondered why he spent so much time there if he found it so boring and suspected that maybe just maybe he didn't find it as boring as he said he found it, actually seemed a little less not-boring to Remus. Now boredom seemed to hang in the air like some kind of mind-numbing mist and it had only been four hours. And they said boring people were never bored. Bored people were never boring, more like.

Remus was looking for a free corner where he could look through _Manipulating Minds _by O. Clemency when his sound-proof shoes allowed him to overhear a conversation that didn't seem that interesting but he stopped and eaves-dropped anyway instinctively.

"I just feel so _bored" _said Skeeter. "I can't concentrate on writing this article for the school paper, and the time it took me to _find _all the dirty details! And I really want to finish it before I have to go to camp"

"I had no idea your parents were pro-purification" said Bozo, whom was seldom heard speaking. This was the first time Remus heard him talk. He even had to peek at them to see just who Skeeter was sitting with, to make sure.

"It's a secret I have kept well" Skeeter sighed. "Nobody ever suspects a Hufflepuff, although can you imagine better hunters and inquisitors?"

"What if I come with you? We can turn it all into an article. It will be your ticket to the Prophet"

"That's what I was going to suggest"

_Damn, _Remus thought. If Skeeter had been reluctant to go, he or James could have offered to go in her place.

"A few people have gone there the past few days" said Bozo. "When does it really start?"

"Tomorrow Monday at ten. Now, where is that list of campers from Hogwarts I was going to publish?" Papers rustled. "Ah, here it is"

"Let me see" said Bozo. "I had no idea so many Slytherins needed that camp. That's a lot of Hufflepuffs. Fletcher too?"

"Yeah you really couldn't tell by looking. And Aurora is still trying to _find _a way out of it"

Although Remus still didn't think Sirius was incapable of saving himself _if he wanted to, _he knewit would be just typical of him to underestimate the power of brainwashing and overestimate his own ability to resist it. His exaggerated confidence had put him in slightly damselly positions in the past, and since the brainwashing hadn't started yet anyway there was no reason they couldn't at least talk it over with him.

The map was really just an endless chain of flaps and sometimes it seemed like it would take a life time to go over them all because it didn't just cover Hogwarts but also Hogsmead. So to find one person among thousands of names would have been impossible had not the names that were of particular interest looked a little different. Prefects were underlined, animagi (registered and unregistered alike) were written in italics and Professors blinked in red. This way of highlighting those of power and special abilities didn't apply to the makers, of course, because that wasn't necessary. James had kept searching every lane and alleyway after Remus had left to put his time to better use, thinking that he was probably right: Sirius would save himself (If he wanted to). It was just that, things were suddenly so inexplicably _boring. _It wasn't as if they had ever spent _every single second of the day _together like a co-dependent couple (because Sirius didn't do quidditch and James didn't do drama), but he had never been this bored when they had been in separate parts of Hogwarts before.

When he noticed he was looking at flaps he had looked at before, he m&m'ed it and put it back on the wall. Then he got changed and tossed the clothes that had become dusty from lying on the floor in the self-washing linen basket in the bathroom. When he came back into the dorm Dung was already tip-toeing towards the door with a treasure chest. James cast the _Whipping Rulers _charm on his thieving fingers. Wincing in pain Dung dropped the treasure chest on his feet.

"Fucking hell…" he swore in a very high pitch, his eyes tearing up.

"Get out. We won it fair and square" said James, picking up the treasure chest.

"Fair and square?" Dung slurred and blew on his pain inflicted fingers. "You marked the cards with invisibility ink, I'm sure of it!"

"Did _not! _How could I see any markings written in invisibility ink?"

"I don't know. What are those worth?" When Dung tried to take the thick rimmed glasses his fingers were attacked by violent rulers again.

"Come on, Black owes me for the acid pops!" cried Dung. "That was good stuff!"

"No it wasn't. Not as much as a blur"  
The door opened. Remus had come back to drop off some books and he was not surprised to find Dung there arguing about loot again.

"Hello Dung" he said closing the door behind him. "A little birdie told me you're going to purity camp"  
Dung's eyes widened in terror and he backed away. "_A little birdie _told you that?!"

_Birdie, bug… _ "Do you want to go?"

"No! People will try to take my loot while I'm away!"

"Well" said James, already putting on rubber gloves and yanking a hair from Dung's unwashed head. "For fifty fifty you won't have to"  
"Fifty fifty of _my own loot?"_

"You lost it. Don't argue, you're not a very good wizard"

Still blowing on his bruised fingers Dung went towards the door. "Wherever you hide it, I _will _find it"

"Ditto"  
"You Gryffindors can't find your own noses"

The dorm became a little more fragrant after Dung had gone and some of the toast mold returned. James put the treasure on his bed for now.

"You're a good finder aren't you Moony?"

"Oh no, don't involve me in your loot conflicts"

"On second thought you can't be that good since you're here anyway"

"I just found two unwilling campers, so _there"_

They had one more hair to snag for their instant-polys. Remus dropped off those books and James put the treasure back rapidly in the cupboard with the gorgon in the green frock.

Dusty crystal balls glistened in the glass cabinets. Strings of smoke noodled out of sticks of frankincense and made the divination classroom smell like Christmas. Purple drapes kept unwanted light outside, and light was always unwanted when communicating with other dimensions and connecting with one's intuition. Aurora sat by a small, circular table covered in cloth identical to that covering the windows, in the light of an oil lamp calculating figures for her astrological chart on a piece of scrap paper.

"Aries" James looked over her shoulder. "I would never have guessed it"

"That's because there's more to astrology than the sun sign" said Aurora. "Like the moon sign and the rising sign, for example"  
"Which one is more important?"

"Well that depends on what you mean by important"

"Which one decides who I should marry?"

Aurora dipped her quill in her chart ink. "Would you like me to tell you who you'd be most compatible with?"

"Sure"  
Aurora studied him. Then she closed her eyes. "Sun sign Gemini… Moon sign Libra… Rising sign Aries, correct?"

"I don't know"

"Any air or fire sign would do"

"That's it? That's not very impressive"

"Fine" Aurora opened her eyes again. "You want something specific? Leo, then"

"_Leo?" _That was the last he wanted to hear, because he seemed to recall from when they had been assigned to guess each others' signs a couple of years back that Sirius' had been Leo and people already had funny ideas.

"Yeah, Leo. Most people like Leos"

"What about, I don't know, Aquarius?"

"Like I said, any air or fire sign will do"

"Fine" said James and nudged Remus, who had been folding a paper fortune teller from a blank piece of paper, closer to Aurora. "Do him next"  
"No, that's fine-"said Remus but was cut off by Aurora's intuitive reading almost immediately.

"Sun sign Pisces, Moon sign Cancer, Rising sign Virgo…" She contemplated for a moment. Then she opened one eye, looking a little worried. "That's quite a lot of water"

"Is that bad?" Suddenly Remus felt nervous as if Aurora was a doctor with bad news.

"Yes, but who should he marry?" James asked. "My bet is on Leo"

Aurora guffawed for a good ten minutes, clutching her stomach and gasping for air. When she was finished she dried her eyes. "Good one! Cat and fish is bound to be a disaster. Cats love playing with their food"

"Hubba hubba…"

"Try Libra"

James wiggled his thick rims suggestively. "Mac is Libra"  
"I thought you wanted to rescue damsels and not play" Remus threaded the paper fortune teller on his hands "_Who-will-I-marry-when-I-grow-up?" _ He unfolded a flap. "Hagrid"  
"What's his sign?" James asked.

"Libra" Aurora replied.

"There you go then"

Aurora continued calculating on her horoscope for the coming week. "Is that why you came to see me? For match making advice?"

"Yes, and also to ask you if you're going to purity camp"

Aurora nearly knocked the frankincense over. "How did you know?"

"Doesn't matter. Do you want to go?"

"Of course not! They brainwash people!"  
"Well, then you're in luck. We can go in your place" said James, plucking a hair from Auroras' gigantic afro.


	11. The Worm Clock

Always Purée

Part 11: The Worm Clock

The following morning after breakfast, James and Remus found themselves a bathroom with broken plumbing where they could poly-shift prior to journeying to Liberty Cap Island. Peter couldn't come along because he really couldn't afford to miss any classes now that exam season was approaching, and furthermore, somebody had to stay and take notes. They also thought it might be a good idea if at least one of them stayed away from the area of shady brain washing because none of them really knew what to expect.

"Well I just can't decide if I want to be a boy or a girl" said James, weighing between the strands of hair. Then he offered the curly strand to Remus. "You'd be more convincing"

"Fine" Remus pinched the hair. "I would rather trade my body for that of a girl than a gross bloke"  
"That's a good point, but since you just admitted you'd be more comfortable in a woman's body, well, I wouldn't want to stand in your way" James unscrewed his instant-poly.

"How considerate of you to let me get dressed as Aurora in the morning and not Dung, and take showers as Aurora and not Dung"

"And wear knickers as Aurora and not Dung. You're welcome"

They were dressed as themselves and had not intended to change their clothes, thinking that it would hardly matter what they wore on that island.

"Better knickers than Dung's dirty pants, but I know you like dirty pants" Remus mumbled, searching his bag. James eyed him challengingly.

"I'm sorry, that was completely unnecessary" Remus therefore apologized for the sudden outburst of sass.

"Would you prefer to be Dung? Be honest"

"No I would find that repulsive"

"And I don't particularly fancy the idea of having to put on a bra in the morning so stop fussing"

They stuck their hairs in their test tubes.

"You fussed _first" _Remus muttered.

"When did you start talking back so much? Padfoot and I were going to make you our docile servant, but he just _had _to push your buttons a little too much"

Remus just gave him that guilt-inducing do-you-have-something-you-would-like-to-say-to-me look, a look that didn't work on Sirius which was why outbreaks of fury was usually reserved for him, but it did evoke a little bit of regret in James.

"That was a _joke" _he thus said. "We did not at all talk about making you our docile servant. That thought never crossed our minds" He was telling the truth because unlike slaves, servants got paid and had rights.

The camp was to officially begin in less than fifteen minutes. Those who didn't smoke waited inside because it was cold out. Those who smoked annoyed non-smokers who still wanted fresh air by blowing smoke in their faces and telling them to move if they didn't want smoke in their faces. Last minute arrivers were dropped off on the camp grounds by blue cloaked camp staff until the very last minute.

"So… So" Reggie was experiencing that thing where he knew he had the arguments but just couldn't find them at the moment, as if a wind had blown in through a window in his mind and messed up an otherwise neat desk. "If it's not illegal, why is it so hush-hush? You know it is, don't play dumb!"

The mattresses here were uncomfortable and moth eaten and Sirius thought it was a little early in the morning for time-wasting discussions. This discussion had long ago turned into a broken record and he could not see what Reggie expected to get out of fussing so much.

"Do you _want _to bring all the muggles to Diagon Alley all of a sudden?" he asked. "Is that it?"

"No that is _not _what I meant!" And the reason Reggie couldn't drop the broken record was because he was convinced that Sirius refused to take it seriously just to avoid risking being convinced at last for real, and this he wanted to prove and the stubbornness he was met with was gratingly irritating.

"So stop fussing!" Sirius told him off, equally irritated at having to put up with this pointless obstinacy. "It would get really crowded and annoying!"

The crowd of new arrivals seemed to grow exponentially with every passing second and Sirius found most faces unfamiliar. The small gathering from Hogwarts stuck together, but since Reggie didn't feel as if he really belonged with them he kept to himself. Yesterday Sirius had let himself be escorted without putting up any resistance with the intention of looking out for him and be generally available but not two hours into his stay had the urge to just shake him like a cage of snappish parakeets arisen, and this was not helped by the fact that Reggie kept trying to provoke a fight. The only thing that kept Sirius from dumping him for the gathering of non-fussing students right now was the soothing floo powder. As the sound of fussing drifted into the background of his mind, he saw a pair of blue cloaked wizards drop off Dung. He didn't seem to be drunk or high and his posture was straight and not slouched. He also looked clean. Sirius went up to him.

"Good morning Prongs"  
"I don't know to whom you're referring"

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm here to rescue you like the damsel you are"

"You don't think I can get out of here on my own?" Next he saw Aurora being dropped off just a little bit away from them. "Morning Aurora"  
"No I didn't" said James. "Also I was bored anyway. So very, very bored"

"Me too. I can't wait to find out how they do it, to be honest"

"Maybe you should be careful. Brainwashing is a powerful thing"  
"I think I can resist pictures of burn victims"

"We thought you'd say that. This camp still has a 98% success rate. Odds aren't exactly with you"

Sirius glanced at Aurora who just stood there silently listening to them talk. He didn't have a problem with it; he just thought it was a little weird because she didn't normally do that and there were other Hufflepuffs nearby.

"Anything interesting in the horoscopes today?" he asked her.

James put a hand to his mouth to cover his amusement. Remus decided just to roll with it.

"Expect a hectic pace" he replied airily, repeating what he had read in the Prophet.

"Ok"

"Would you like to know who you're most compatible with?" James asked.

"Pass"

Their little group grew when Roy decided he wanted to say hello to the newcomers.

"Good morning Dung, Good morning Aurora!" he told them.

"Morning" they replied.

"Would you like to know who you're most compatible with?" James asked him.

"Yes I would like that very much!"

The massive afro wobbled like a blancmange when Remus shook it in protest. "I can't do it here. I need time of birth, a sidereal birth chart, an atlas, a calculator"

"You didn't before" said James.

"I made all that up"  
"No you didn't"

"Please?" Roy pleaded.

"Ok…" Remus shut his eyes tightly. "Sun sign… Capricorn?"

"No"

"Sagittarius?"

"No"

He opened his eyes again. "When's you're birth day?"

"That's cheating" said James.

Campers began shuffling inside the old asylum now. Sirius dropped the remaining stump of the second floo roll of the morning and put it out in the muddy grass with his shoe.

"If you're so afraid of brainwashing there's no point in both of us being exposed to it"

"It starts in five minutes" said Roy, fiddling his cuffs nervously. "I wish I had your confidence, but I can be a little weak and impressionable"

Sirius snapped his fingers. "You're a fish"

"How did you guess?"

"I recognized those words from an astrology book"

Remus studied Roy pensively and said peacefully: "Your rising sign must be Leo because you seem so pompous and condescending"

"I am so very flawed" Roy looked down at his feet slightly dismally.

"That was a bit harsh" said James.

"I agree about that rising sign, you seem to be very generous and creative" said Sirius.

"And dominant and intolerant" Remus added to that.

"Rora?"

"What is it?"

"Do you have some unresolved issue?"

"Why do you ask that?"

"Because you act like I hit a nerve. Did you just come here to retain anger?"

"No. Excuse me" Remus left to embark on his investigation of the area in a state less serene than the one he had arrived in. Roy parted from them shortly after when a wizard in a blue cloak announced through a megaphone that they had to be inside in five minutes.

"What's her problem?" Sirius muttered.

"Maybe she's retaining _luuuuuv!" _said James.

"We both agreed we weren't compatible"

"Maybe it's the position of certain heavenly bodies messing up her charts"

"Astrologers are so touchy" Sirius rolled his eyes.

"Yes…" James scraped the ground with his shoes restlessly. "I think I will go after her"

"Why?"

"Because I love her!" James ran inside the asylum.

Incidentally the moon was in the constellation of the dragon, which could make those sensitive to its position particularly on edge during all its phases. But whether or not Remus's occasional outbursts of oversensitivity were a result of the position of heavenly bodies or Sirius's persistent button-pushing or a combination of both, that was really for the philosophers to debate.

Now Remus was in the director's office looking for information. Staff had tried to stop him by threatening with their wands, but they had done so at a distance from which he could easily knee them where it would really hurt. Then their agonizing moans helped James navigate to the office they had guarded.

"Found anything interesting?" he asked when he arrived and looked through papers on the desk that had probably already been looked through.

"No" said Remus and began tugging at cupboard doors.

"If it starts today what was the point with starting early with pictures of burn victims?"

"To keep them busy? To…" Suddenly Remus found on the desk a transcript. "To make it seem like that's all they do?"

He read through the transcript several time, searching for clues. "Pause for effect" he read. "It says, 25 times. A standard rhetorical pause shouldn't override 4 seconds"

"So?"

"That's a total of 100 seconds"

"No, I'm sorry. I don't follow you at all"

"25 times 4 is a 100"

"Now it all makes sense, thanks, that's why you're the smart one…"

"Think about it…" Remus began searching the desk frenetically. "Why schedule rhetorical pauses? Who does that?"

"Beginners? You?"

"100 seconds of complete silence, right? What will people hear?"

"Nothing if it's complete silence"

"Ok, not complete silence. What will everybody hear in the back of their heads during the pauses when they process what they have just heard? What might they hear?"

"If you know the answer and you're just testing me then I would just guess…" Fumbling among the papers James suddenly found a bill. "A worm clock"

Having a theory confirmed had an almost orgasmic effect. "Earworms"

"_You got spunk, the sass…" _James began humming automatically as he passed Remus the bill.

"_You're the one, oh- _No, not that kind of earworm. Earworms live in grandfather clocks and they are so small you can't see them with the naked eye. They lay their eggs in brains and when they enter a brain they make a sound like a 'tick'. Or is it 'tock'?"

"Like a clock"

"Like a single… tick or tock…"

"Have you heard a tick or tock recently per chance?"

"Anyway, they never come out while people are talking. When people aren't talking they think they are asleep. That's when they come out and they strike in sync to ticking clocks to camouflage the sound they make, making your brain very manipulable. 100 seconds, 98 brains…" Remus reached for a bottle of hand cream on the desk and squeezed some onto his hands.

"What's that?" James asked, feeling as if he had only been speaking in question marks since he had gotten there. This lecture about worms that liked antiquity felt like the story with the nargles all over again but he tried to keep an open mind this time.

"Worm cream I hope"  
"Of course you do. Where you the kind of child that ate worms and dirt at the playground?"

Remus was smearing his hands with the utmost care, making sure to get the space between the fingers.

"I didn't go to any playgrounds" he said almost apologetically as if he was embarrassed to admit it.

It just bordered on heartbreaking that some children were so sheltered they missed out on eating dirt and worms at playgrounds and were instead put through a different kind of brainwashing. James reached for the worm cream, unable to shake the feeling that he was falling victim for a practical joke, but better safe than sorry. He could always get back. "So how do you get rid of them?"

"I don't know"

It was ten past ten and the campers were scheduled to be put through the first rhetorical pause. Things were urgent.

The door to the room where the brain washing was taking place was of course locked and well protected. And even if they had just barged in, Mr. Stevens could easily just summon a whole group of camp staff to take the overconfident pair away while he carried on as normal with only a slight delay.

"Now some auror hair strands would be great" said Remus.

"Well that's just great that 98 people are quietly sitting in there waiting to lose their minds completely" said James. "There has to be a cure or treatment"

"Maybe there is"

"But you don't know of any"

"There is one but it's not safe"

"So why did you say you didn't know?"

"I meant that maybe something new and better has turned up. You have to inject the affected part of the brain with a kind of scorching potion as minimally as possible. It's dangerous stuff and there's no guarantee the patient will wake up _less _insane, if he wakes up"

They looked through the door through their see-ears. The campers were being put through yet another rhetorical pause, judging by the nodding.

"Well I regret to say I don't have any auror hair on me at this moment…" said James.

"Then we must summon them" Remus pointed his wand to the sky.

"No don't summon them!"

"Why not?"

"That will only waste time and solve nothing!"

"As opposed to this?"

"The director will say: "No we don't have any earworms", slip them some money and that will be the end of that"

"If not summon them then what?" Remus pointed his wand up again. "It will temporarily halt things"  
"Yes" James cast _megaphonus _on his wand and began shouting into it whilst alternating knocking on the door and stunning wizards in blue cloaks that came running. "_This is the aurors! Come out with your hands up! I repeat! You have the right to remain silent! Anything you say or don't say will be used against you!"_

James kept repeating lines from action movies and stunning wizards to his own sound effects. Mr. Stevens had barely unlocked the door before a stunning ray hit him in the chest and knocked him down like a bowling pin.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" James asked and gave Sirius the finger.

"Did you figure out how they do it?"

"Yes! Brain worms apparently. _You should all read up on brain worms when you get home. That will be your homework! _Well that's a relief that the insides of your brain doesn't need scorching"

"No, my brain is not what needs scorching"

James glanced behind him at the grandfather clock that stood alarmingly close to them in a corner.

"What needs scorching?"

"Oh" Sirius smiled like a comic-book antagonist. "I think you know"


	12. The Unbreakable-Truth-Proof-Swear

Always Purée

Part 12: The Unbreakable-Truth-Proof-Swear

It was sometime after lunch when they were back at Hogwarts. Remus had gone beforehand so Sirius would keep thinking he hadn't been there at all. He was already packing for a library visit when Sirius came barging into the dorm along with James who no longer looked like Dung.

"How was camp?" Remus asked nervously because that transcript had featured quite an extensive list of hate objects.

"Kind of boring" Sirius threw himself on his bed on top of mirrors and cat treats and picked up a calendar. He was acting so deceitfully normal, not at all like a text book brainwashed person.

"People are so whiny, aren't they?" he said, flicking between pages. "Everybody complains but who does anything? It feels like I'm the only person in the world who does things before complaining" Then he mumbled about April 14.

"What happens on April 14?" James asked.

"A couple of us are getting together to scorch some muggles" He didn't even sound sinister saying it as if he equated scorching muggles with going to see a moderately interesting film. "Do you two want to come along?"

"Uhm…" To stop him, sure.

"That's so weird. Why have I highlighted all the full moons?"

The door opened and closed discretely, reducing three to two.

"Padfoot?"

"What?"

James wondered if there was just a tiny chance that Sirius was just messing with them.

"Any… black holes in your memory? Or anything at all that is weird and brain related? Anything you got!"

"No. Why?"

"Like I said at the camp, brain worms. It's very likely that you have them. You did sit very close to that clock"

"If I do it doesn't feel like it"

"Ok, but you should probably get checked anyway just to be on the safe side. Sometimes it takes a while for things to break out" He didn't know if that was the case with earworms, but for all he knew it could be.

"If I start getting brain issues I'll make sure to get checked" Sirius assured him.

"Can't you do it right away? For me? So I can get some peace of mind. It'll only take a second"

Sirius looked up from his calendar contemplatively. "Sure" 

The diagnostic wand beeped like a backing truck when healer Mugwort ran it over Sirius.

"You seem fine" he said and pocketed the wand in his apron. Sirius hopped down from the bunk.

"Feel better?"

"Where's Pomfrey?" James asked Mugwort.

"She's at the intensive care unit at St Mungos. She was bitten trying to collect nectar from a Monster Venus Fly Trap"

"Didn't she stroke it?"

"Apparently not everything that bites likes stroking" said Mugwort, scribbling on a chart.

Perhaps that meant not everything that bit liked m&ms either.

"Well I'm leaving" said Sirius.

"You do that I'll catch up" said James. "I think I'm coming down with something"

Mugwort whipped out his wand again and ran it over James. "Coming down with what? A cold?"

James waved the intruding wand away from his face when Sirius had gone.

"How did you not find anything? Are you sure you did things properly?

"Of course I did things properly" said Mugwort. "What did you want me to find?"

"I wanted- I _expected _you to find earworms"

"Well" Mugwort began tidying a tray of equipment. "Fortunately I didn't"

"But I _know _he has them"

"How do you know?"

"Because he's _different!_"

"Different how?"

People who talked like therapists were the worst, people who used that tone that suggested they had decided to dismiss your stories as fantasies and didn't really care about what you said. James decided to take his errand to McGonagall instead.

"Because he's _different!" _ he explained to McGonagall.

McGonagall wasn't teaching more today and had fortunately been available in her office. She had been pouring herself another whiskey when James asked to see her, but she had insisted that she was really busy correcting homework and that she was just having a quick break. Then she told him to get off her back because he wasn't her mother. Then she had asked what he wanted.

"Different how?" she said.

"Before the pride camp he didn't care one way or the other about muggles and now he's arranging scorching meetings. And we're really sure they had earworms at that place"

"Has he gotten checked?"

"Mugwort said he didn't find anything but I _know _he's lying"

McGonagall rummaged through the basket of identical glasses on her desk. _Nope, those are my reading glasses, those are my driving glasses, those are my teaching glasses… Drinking glasses, here we go. _She put them on and sipped on her whiskey. 

"Mugwort was appointed by the ministry and the ministry is full of corrupt arse hats" she said. "Not sure if I'd prefer you to be right, 'though.

She began going through her drawers, stopping once to switch to her searching glasses, until she found a business card. She gave it to James. "Try Healers Without Borders. It's a non-profit organization of healers and Pomfrey used to work for them"

Then she switched back to her drinking glasses and pretended to correct homework.

They were still kissing frogs and swans in classic magic class because Professor Cornball refused to move on from the subject of the reversing power of love until everybody had done their presentation. Months later and nobody apart from Miss Goody had done the assignment, and she had not only done it once but four times.

Remus had spent the class brushing up on the anatomy of the brain ever since Cornball had left to escort Peter to the hospital wing after having been bitten in the eye by a swan. Sirius had arrived shortly after.

"April 14" he said. "Come on it'll be fun!"

"Pass" Remus disappeared behind the book again.

"What, you have something better to do?"

"'Better'?"

Fortunately James showed up, sparing Remus from having to reinvent the ghost of Aunt Muriel who haunted a house boat and who always needed help with her hysterical cats during high tide.

"Healers Without Borders" he told Sirius, waving with the business card and pulling up a chair. "Try them"

"Why?" Sirius asked.

"Because St Mungos is corrupt and so is Mugwort"

"So what? I feel fine"

"What about my peace of mind? Worms in the brain can seriously damage you. I really think you should get a second opinion"  
"So, what, you think Mugwort lied? Why would he do that?"

"I don't know. The money?"

"Metabolism!" Remus suddenly blurted out. "They could mess up your metabolism"

"Yes! Make you fat!"

Sirius eyed them both suspiciously. "Why do I get the feeling you're making things up as you go?"

"I have no idea. Why do you get that feeling?" James checked Sirius for a fever.

"Paranoia, that's another common symptom" said Remus.

"When you get checked again you can ask"

"Look" said Sirius. "I know the two of you haven't realized the threat that is the muggle invasion"

"What threat would that be?"

"Everything that is bad in the world"  
"Oh"

"Yeah, 'oh'. If you don't want to kill anybody that's fine. But don't assume there's something wrong with my brain just because my opinion is different from yours!"

"This has nothing to do with that" said James. "I don't give two hoots about your opinions, just get checked"

"I won't try to change your opinion as long as you don't try to change mine" Sirius dug through his pockets and found a silver bracelet and put it on. "Although I can't remember why I stopped wearing this one. I forgot I had it until I found it in the drawers today. Do you suppose you could have a bracelet for a wand?"

Remus closed his book and packed to leave. "Why don't I research that for you?" he asked and left without awaiting any reply.

"Memory loss, you say…" James stroked his chin. "Do you really need more convincing from me?"

"It's _just _a bracelet. Meanwhile is it just me or is there something fishy about Moony?"

James was really beginning to question how memory loss worked.

"Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. If you get checked at Healers Without Borders, I… will… tell you something _really _juicy… about him. You will just love it"

Sirius accepted the deal on the condition that they made the Unbreakable-Truth-Proof-Swear.

Healers Without Borders had their clinic in Hogsmead between Zonkos and the post office on Undertakerstreet. James brought Sirius there first thing after school and now a Healer Yarrow ran her diagnosing wand over him just like Healer Mugwort had done, and just like Mugwort was she unable to detect anything unusual.

"He seems fine" she said.

"Marvelous" Sirius clapped his hands together. "Now what was that really juicy thing you swore to tell me?"

"Are you joking?" James went up to Yarrow who was sorting among papers on her desk. "No earworms?"

"Earworms?" Yarrow scribbled on her clip board. "Earworms are very, very small and virtually undetectable in their early stages. I will have to direct you to St Mungos for a more thorough examination"  
"But aren't they corrupt?"

Yarrow switched from her examination glasses to her discussion glasses.

"Let me guess: pride camp?"

"_Yes!"_

"It's not earworms"

"How do you know?"

"The suspected area of contamination has been thoroughly investigated by the St Mungos Infestation Committee in collaboration with the aurors. No earworms were found"

"If not earworms then what? He's been acting weird ever since that camp!"

"Have _not!" _Sirius objected. "He just thinks it's weird I forgot I had this bracelet because I haven't seen it for a couple of years"

"That's completely normal" said Yarrow.

James was in a good mood of kneeing them both where it would really hurt but controlled himself. "Wait a tick" he said. "Or a tock. How did you know his worms are in their early stages?"

Yarrow blinked a couple of times. "Obviously I… Excuse me" She stuck her head through the door. "What's that? His head chewed off? I'll be right with you!" Yarrow excused herself and ran out of her office.

"Now do you have your peace of mind?" Sirius asked as they crossed through the waiting room and exited the clinic.

"Not at all"

"It is just possible that I am at last convinced"

It was breezy outside and they both pulled their coat collars up not only to look cool and enhance their cheekbones but also to protect those cheekbones from cold as they followed the street to the sweets shop on Basket Maker Street.

"Maybe if it wasn't for that memory loss" said James.

"It was _one bracelet! _" said Sirius and halted. "Now what was that juicy thing you unbreakable-truth-proof-swore to tell me?"

James filtered his mind for something he knew but Sirius didn't.

"Uhm… Did you know he writes Charlie's Angels fanfiction?"

"I showed you those"

"Oh. I suppose there was nothing, then" James nose shot out like a branch and grew a leaf at the tip. A pair of birds began nesting on top. "Ok, how about this?"

James searched his mind some more although he didn't expect to find anything. It was actually more likely for Sirius to know things that he didn't and he told James quite a lot, especially if it was funny.

"I got it!" he said when he came up with something. "He was Aurora at the camp! You didn't know that!"

"He was? That explain why she was so touchy"

They continued their stroll.

"How did you not know that? What part of me showing up with Aurora made sense to you?"

"I don't know. I just assumed she stuck around because she recognized us. And that Moony had wits enough to realize a rescue mission was unnecessary, which it was. So it turns out you both wasted your time. Doesn't matter"

The nesting birds escaped the nose when it to shrunk back to normal.

"So you got out of this one" said Sirius. "Although it wasn't _that _juicy. Clearly it must be something _very _juicy"

"Maybe it wasn't that juicy then. I was sure you'd find him being a transgender juicy enough"

"How about you make another swear if I get checked at St Mungos?"

"No I'm convinced now. Can I see your bracelet?"

Sirius, who had been spinning the bracelet around his finger like a hula hoop, passed it to James, who switched to his analyzing glasses before throwing it in the claws of a passing magpie. "Oops I dropped it"

"What the hell did you do that for?!" Sirius tried to accio the bracelet from the magpie, but the magpie was already well ahead of him.

"I am so sorry I did _not _see that magpie"

"Then maybe you should switch to your magpie glasses!" Sirius yanked the analyzing glasses from James and threw it into the claws of another magpie.

"Come on, I _need _those!"

"You started it"

"Flip, now I have to use my sneaking-around glasses" James dug into his trousers for the only extra pair he had on himself at the moment.

To avoid having other well-meaning students attempt to be sociable with Remus when he was researching things he for whatever reason didn't want to talk about he applied to the area above the window in his favoured corner of the library the same trick that made the blank parchment on the wall in the dorm repulsive instead of intriguing, that was to say, he made the area look as if it was infested with maggots. Although James saw snakes but he knew it was just a trick and how to make the nasty stuff go away.

"Is there any chance at all that it is not ear worms?" he asked when he had recovered.

"Of course there's a chance it's not ear worms" said Remus, flicking through volume two of _Molding the mind: 101 ways, _and tenser than the string on a cello_. _"There's always a chance it's not ear worms!"

"I _mean _are there any alternatives that you have thought of while I was away chasing magpies and doing other important things?"

"It just fits so well"

Evening was already falling and Easter decorations were already up although Easter wasn't for another week. But Yuletide was worse; the Yule decorations were often up before the Halloween decorations.

"It's just so very convenient that they are so small" said James plucking from the windowsill a family of rabbit figurines and placed them in front of him on the table and watched them hop around. A glass jar with a loupe attached to the lid was slammed on the table, scaring away the bunnies.

"They were there, 'though, look" said Remus.

The jar was lined with some kind of gross tissue and pieces of oak and you didn't need to look through the loupe to see that something was living there; you could just watch the tissue be eaten away by nothing. But James looked anyway and noted that the earworms looked more like winged shrimp than worms.

"Well that's the evidence covered so why are you still looking for alternatives?"

Remus shut the book and shoved it away from him. "Because I want it to be something else that's easier to solve"

"Would an infection from a Monster Venus Fly Trap be easier to solve?"

Yes it would. Anything would be easier to solve.


	13. Voldemort

Always Purée

Part 13: Voldemort

It didn't matter if it wasn't real, the image of his own father in a green frock and a matching hat with a goose on top was truly shudder inducing and the perfect object for Sirius to practice torture curses on in the room of requirement because of it, after all, only by being the master of your fears could you be the master of yourself and sub sequentially the master of others. Torturing was not surprisingly very exhausting but like with most things training made it less exhausting. Sirius wasn't just convinced at last, he was taking matters into his own hands and doing everything necessary to help him in his cause, starting with changing his wardrobe from camp and glam to sophisticated and dignified (which basically meant lots of high collars and lots of mother-of-pearl buttons and only colours from the grey scale).

One night when he left the room of requirement after having tortured the projection of his frock wearing father for a couple of hours, pondering where to arrange a nice stake to scorch muggles on, a group of Slytherins out of their dorms after curfew caught up with him.

"Psst!" said one of them. "We've heard you're convinced at last!"

"What of it?"

Another looked around to make sure nobody was listening. "The Death Eaters have a meeting tonight! Why don't you come?"

"No thanks that sounds boring"

"How can you say that?" asked the first one. "Everyone is really buzzing about the persecution dates your arranging all of a sudden! You must be interested!"

"Can't I persecute muggles without wanting an ugly tattoo?" Sirius rebuffed because he didn't automatically like Slytherins just because he was convinced at last and he did not think they had some patented right on being convinced anymore.

The Slytherins exchanged glances. They hadn't been prepared for this in their recruitment courses. One muttered that he thought the tattoos were, too, cool.

"But aren't you a little bit interested in meeting the Dark Lord at least?"

Yes, Sirius was a little bit interested in meeting the competition.

Arriving at the Headquarters Sirius made it very clear immediately that he was not interested in sitting around playing 20 questions in the drawing room with the other Death Eaters while waiting to be summoned. He demanded he was shown to the Dark Lord right away and even blew the leg off a random Death Eater just to show he meant business. And it worked. He was shown to a very pompous looking door and the guiding Death Eater ran back up the stairs as soon as he was sure Sirius could find the rest of the way on his own.

Sirius shoved the heavy doors open and went straight up to the large desk behind which Voldemort sat frowning over a crossword puzzle, muttering about recording parasites.

"Hello" said Sirius briskly.

"Hello" said Voldemort. "I don't think we've met"

"I'm Sirius Black and I can tell from the look of awe on your face that you _have _heard of me!"

Of course Voldemort had heard of him, half his family served him after all. "Oh, right. You're that one sheep that's different from the other sheep"

"I'm not a _sheep! You're _the sheep!"

"That stubborn stain on an otherwise beautiful façade"

"Oh, _don't _stop! I always knew I was destined for fame"

"Fame for being out of your mind"

"Fame is fame"

Voldemort threw the crosswords in the drawers. "Pray take a seat"

Sirius dismissed the invite with a hand wave. "I won't be long. I just wanted to pop in to say hi, really. Hi"

"Join me"

"No"

"Why not?"

"Serving is not my thing"

Voldemort seemed to consider the words as if he was a careers' advisor. "I see. Haven't you heard that pride goes before the fall?"

"I'm sure it will for you"

They kind of just smirked at each other next.

"I've heard about your extracurricular persecutions. If you think about forming some sort of movement on your own, let me tell you now it will only cause disagreement. That wouldn't exactly help the greater good, now would it?"

Sirius decided to take that seat after all. "So join me"

Everything Voldemort had heard about this boy's stubbornness had clearly been grave understatements. "You have to admit I'm just a little bit more experienced and powerful than you"

"More experienced, sure"

Gravely stubborn and pathologically conceited. Voldemort had never wanted children but now he wondered if it was too late to adopt this one.

"It takes more than a presumptuous disposition to make it, boy" he said. "If you're just here to showcase your arrogance I'm wasting my time. My people and I are well known and feared and that didn't happen overnight. It takes years of hard work and dedication. If you really want to purify society you'll do well in learning from those who are older and wiser than you"

Voldemort was pleased to see his little speech wipe some of that haughtiness off the smug face.

Sirius pouted slightly, unwilling to admit that Voldemort had a point.

"The biggest turn off for me is being summoned when it doesn't suit me" he said.

"Fear is the best ruler. You'll never make it if you play nice"

"Oh. So you don't believe in your own cause?"

"Doesn't make it without risk"

The smugness returned to Sirius's face like moths to lamp.

"Only cowards rule with fear. People who are afraid of betrayal. But why would you fear that? Do you know who fears that? People with secrets"

It was time for some of that haughtiness to be wiped from Voldemort's face. Never once had they broken their eye contact since they had met. Voldemort thought this boy was way too audacious for his own good and a part of him wanted to get rid of him right away while another wanted to win him over. But there really was no need to rush murder and this boy wasn't just compulsively vainglorious, he seemed smart too and on top of that was he really pretty. Truly a dangerous weapon in the rough.

"Are there other Voldemort's?" Sirius asked.

"No"

"No because they all died and you're the last one or no because you made it up?"

"Don't you worry your pretty little head about that"

"Fine" Sirius got up and went to the door. "Well bye"

When he tried to push himself through the doors he found that they were locked. Voldemort came around his desk.

"Your villainous act is very good. You're quite a natural"

"Thank you"

"Why don't I explain to you how recruitment works. Everybody goes through a year of trial as a postulant. Those who pass at the end of the year go on to be novices, those who fail die. Marks are received within a month of the trial year"

Sirius shrugged. "Ok"

Voldemort strummed his slender, pale fingers against the locked doors. "So you don't like serving and you don't want to be summoned at inopportune times. And you're a big fan of courage. You know what brave people have?" Voldemort paused to give Sirius a chance to reply with something smart, and continued when no attempt at being smart was made. "Pressure points. You're all so very noble. So what if I told you that you could trade with anybody here? Anybody at all. Pawn goes free, I get the queen-"

"_Hey! _I'm _slightly bi!"_

"What do you say?"

"Why would I want to trade with anybody?"

"If not to nobly save someone, then to maybe annoy someone? Or spite someone"

Sirius thought about it, thinking that perhaps he could make the trade really good. But he just found the idea of such a big commitment off-putting. He found all commitments off-putting as his ex-girlfriends could attest to. Then that over confidence challenged him to accept the dare just so he could show off big later by getting out of it after having made everybody commit mutiny. Then he realized that when he had made everybody commit mutiny there would be nothing to get out of and he'd have a large group of servants ready to do his bidding without having to work on it for years.

"Alright" he finally said. "Deal"

"Name your object of trade"

"Bella" said Sirius without a moment's of hesitation because he couldn't imagine anybody being more peeved off.


	14. Organic Dark Arts

Always Purée

Part 14: Organic Dark Arts

A healer fluffed Madam Pomfrey's pillow. She had during the week been moved from the intensive care ward to the coma ward and was currently treated with depletion. It was very strange that she hadn't regained consciousness by now.

"Such sweet and well behaved boys you are to come and visit your dear school healer" said the healer and smiled patronizingly at them as if they were toddlers. "Are you sure you don't have class?"

"No we don't have any class" said James sincerely. He and Remus had come here first thing after Herbology. They had worried about how they'd explain things to Sirius but he was so occupied with his own secret activities that that wasn't a problem anymore.

"I'll leave you alone" the healer smiled tenderly at them and they returned it. When she finally left Remus closed the _Little house in the big woods _which was really _Level 2 healing. _The first thing they did was to check the IV that provided the treatment, but they found nothing strange there.

"Why would Pomfrey have collected the nectar?" Remus asked. "That's Sprouts' job"

"Maybe she was unavailable for some reason and it was really urgent" James suggested.

"'Really urgent'? The hospital wing isn't exactly bursting with amnesia patients like in _Spells & Curses. _Sprout collects it, Slughorn stores it and Pomfrey uses it. That's the chain and if Sprout really had been unavailable for some reason another herbologist would have gone in her place"  
"What difference does it make why Pomfrey did it? Clearly she did, and collecting nectar from Monster Venus Fly Traps is perfectly safe as long as you str- sedate them"

"Yeah. And here she is"

They searched the room some more and put all kinds of things through all kinds of tests. When they found nothing they went back to Pomfrey's bed and looked down at her with that annoying feeling that the answer was right in front of them.

"Some people are so mollycoddling" said James. "Why fluff her pillow? She's _unconscious!"_

Remus was about to explain to him that some believed that unconscious people were still present and aware of their surrounding and that the pillow fluffing was most likely an act of compassion.

"And with protective gloves on!" he said instead.

"I was so sure you would call it an act of compassion or something"

After first putting protective gloves on, Remus yanked the pillow from under Pomfrey's bed and threw it on the floor.

"Oh let me guess" said James. "There's a kind of bed bug that lay eggs in your ears and give you really sweet dreams"

"Organic dark arts. It became really big in the 60's"

He pointed his wand at the pillow and cast _Reverse Transfiguration. _They both shrieked a little when the pillow shifted into a giant black leech but regained their calm quickly.

"Isn't it perfect? Leech gets all the blame. 'How did it get here?' 'I blame the immigrants!'"

"Is that one of those rare Pillow-Shifting-Fainting-Slugs I've never heard of?"

They stopped the depletion and cast _salus volatilus _on Pomfrey next. Her nose started twitching. Then she sneezed. She bolted upwards in her bed and saw the fat leech on the floor immediately.

"How did a mare leech get in here?" she asked as she got out of bed.

"Immigrants apparently" said James.

After first disconnecting herself from the IV, Pomfrey twirled her wand around herself to change from the hospital gown to her normal robes.

"They used it to keep you in a coma" said Remus. He sat on the floor emptying his bag, trying to figure out a way to bring the large leech with him. None of the containers he had with him were large enough to fit it.

"Don't you have class?" Pomfrey asked them.

"No we don't have any class" said James.

"Leave that leech" Pomfrey told Remus. "They will want it in the contamination ward"  
"But we probably weren't supposed to know they were using it" Remus argued, tearing a large plastic bag from a roll. Pomfrey saw in the puddle of empty and non-empty containers the glass jar with the gross tissue and picked it up and looked through the loupe. Remus worried that she would want to take it to the contamination ward too, but she returned it.

"Go back to Hogwarts. I will take care of the leech" Pomfrey grabbed hold of the bagged leech with both hands carried it with her when she left.


	15. The Inquisifabs

Always Purée

Part 15: The Inquisifabs

Fridays always brought uplifted spirits. Madam Pince pushed her cart of books back and forth telling students to be cheery elsewhere. Sirius was bunking off Classical Magic class and was putting a family of rabbit figurines through all sorts of torment, really beginning to get into the spirit of Easter.

"It's nice to find someone who is convinced at last that isn't a Slytherin" he said, flicking his wand like a baton as he watched the rabbit figurines dance with jerky movements. "They're still losers"

"Yeah" said Roy, sitting across from Sirius and watching a chicken figurine trying to remember how to fly. "People do tend to think that you have to be a miserable and unattractive Slytherin to see the threat that the muggles are posing, but that is just wrong. Clearly it has nothing to do with ugliness and brainwashing at all"

"Has anybody tried to get you checked for earworms?"

"Earworms?" Roy chuckled. "I try not to take anything Xeno mentions too seriously. He's a bit one card short of a full deck, bless him"

The rabbit figurines where liberated from their forced movements only to be put through some more excruciating pain after having been cradled into a false sense of security.

"I have yet to see one" said Sirius. "I've been dragged to healers all over- _Nothing! _Liberal propaganda is what it is"

"I do hope they aren't real because apparently they can really mess with your sanity"

"They would call it that! Liberals!"

A porcelain chicken had its head accidentally blown to pieces. Roy put down his wand and began flossing.

"Are you going to join the Death Eaters? I've thought about it, but the wardrobe" he shuddered. "Black doesn't really suit me. I prefer bright, happy colours"

"When I've overthrown the Dark Lord everybody can wear what they want"

"That's very ambitious"

They heard the squeaky sound of Pince's cart and ceased their figurine cursing and smiled like angels when she stopped by their table. Her eyes fell on the rabbit figurines with the twisted limbs. Sirius knocked them to the floor quickly.

"It was an accident"

"Madam Pomfrey demands to see you instantly"

"Why?"

"If you don't go professor McGonagall will be noted of it"

Pince hoovered the shards of the broken figurines before leaving.

"Liberals! Why can't they just keep off my ruddy back already?"

"They're desperate"

"Pomfrey is too bored. This place needs more flu breakouts. Roy, are you bookish at all?"

When Roy had finished gurgling mouth wash Sirius passed him the rubber fig that sat on the window sill to water.

"I would say so" said Roy, putting the rubber fig back after spitting and removed his baby blue dental napkin. "Would you like me to look up some sinister viruses while you're away?"

Voldemort had almost fooled Sirius with his talk of how difficult it was to form your own persecution club and he started to regret accepting the deal but only a little.

The gross tissue in the glass jar wasn't shriveling away like before. Suddenly letting Madam Pomfrey study it in her office seemed like an unbelievably stupid move. She had at first even thought it to be unnecessary for her to examine Sirius when Mugwort had already done it but McGonagall had thankfully intervened and changed her mind by referring to paragraphs in the Healing Rule Book. But the lack of visible activity in the jar made James side with Pomfrey instead of McGonagall in this matter.

"It looks like he really is fine" said Pomfrey.

"I suppose it wasn't earworms then. My bad" said James.

"Hardly surprising considering they don't exist" said Sirius getting off the bunk.

"Yes they do"

"They didn't find any at the camp"

"Moony did"

"Oh yeah?" Sirius looked unimpressed at the jar with gross tissue. "And I suppose they're in your jar there"

Passing the jar to Sirius, James knew exactly what was coming. Sirius looked for two second before returning it.

"Do they pass through glass?"

A Slytherin with a frog for a head was hit in the face by the door. Several students with body parts of swans and toads queued outside the hospital wing to be fixed from mishaps in Advanced Classical Magic class.

"I mean really" Sirius went on and started to get angry. "You just can't leave me be! So you disagree, _fine! _But _lying?! _That's just pathetic!"

"Try this jar" Remus passed him one of his spare jars that he kept hidden because one could never expect too much of the worse. Sirius snatched it from him and put his eye to the loupe. He looked away instantly, grimacing in disgust but he did become visibly calmer.

"How weird are you? You could have found those anywhere"

"Do you think I have a map of every grandfather clock in southern England?"

Yes Sirius did think that, he did have maps over weirder things after all. "Why not? You do like keeping track of infested furniture. You probably found those somewhere at some point and kept them like you keep all the stupid bugs you find when you're out antiquing and thought that here was a chance to put at least one of your useless bugs to use! Why would Pomfrey lie?"

When nobody felt inclined to propose a theory, Sirius shoved the jar in Remus's chest with such force he hit his back in the wall.

"I do wish you'd stop cramming the dorm with your gross pests. Get help" he said and left. It was truly the nightmare of year one all over again. It seemed like just about every healer was conspiring against them and there really was no time to figure out why. It looked like they would just have to take matters into their own hands. _Again. _

Irritated with the recent exchange, Sirius hoped that Roy could provide some solace in the form of a sinister virus to release in muggle Hogsmead. Instead he found him looking through a box of stickers.

"I don't care what they say you're never too old for stickers!" he said.

"Did you find anything?" Sirius asked.

"Not yet" He put down the box and picked up _The Big Book of Evil Viruses _again. "I was just taking a break"

Never had Sirius heard of such nonsense from somebody supposedly bookish. A break? From reading? What?

"It's been ten minutes. You _must _have found something"

Roy put down the book again. "You asked if I was bookish, _not _if I was a good finder!"

Flip, Sirius thought, but it wasn't the end of the world. He would simply have to find himself a bookish Hufflepuff. That couldn't be too difficult. He went to search the library for a suitable badger-hugger and found just on the other side of the shelves Rita and Bozo from the school paper.

"I need candid photos for my article" said Rita. "Why don't you snap some for me?"

Bozo disappeared around the shelves with his camera obediently. Sirius took his place.

"Hello" he said. Rita practically crawled across the table on top of piles of lose papers, note book and quill in hand.

"You've met the Dark Lord. What's he like?"

"Secretive"

"Oh" The magic quill was unable to turn that into a paragraph longer than a sentence. When Rita realized she was still wearing her writing glasses she switched to her interview glasses. "Would you describe him as great and brilliant?"

"Not really"

The quill was so confused and did not know what to make of this. "You wouldn't?"

"The ground work that he's made is pretty good but I think it's time for somebody younger to take over, somebody with fresh ideas"

Rita crawled off the table back onto the bench, tapping her article on why mudbloods shouldn't be prefects with her quill. "And I assume you have yourself in mind? Do you really think you have a chance?"

"Everything starts with an idea"

"But he's so powerful and they are so many"

When she saw Sirius glance out the window she did the same. A rabbit hopped on the grounds. Sirius blew it to fleshy piece with a single glance. One ear hit the window. Rita knocked her ink over.

"Are you going to join the DE's?" he asked her.

"Me? No"

"Why not?"

"Why the masks! Do I wear my glasses over or under? Under would be uncomfortable, over would ruin anonymity. I assume that's what the masks are for"

"For hiding like cowards yes that's what they are for"

The spilt ink had stained several article drafts quite badly. Swearing, Rita pulled several sheets of wet wipes from a box.

"Besides, the tattoos aren't very discrete are they? The Daily Prophet might not want to hire me"

"So help me find an alternative" said Sirius, locking fingers and leaning forwards.

Rita took off her glasses to polish them some. "I don't know. The school paper…"

"No masks, no tattoos. Voldemort can keep the scaredy-cats. I need an evil, bookish Hufflepuff and one that does propaganda would be even better"

The shock from seeing a rabbit have its head blown to fleshy pieces had died down and although flattered, Rita wasn't terribly tempted by the offer just yet.

"So you got the wardrobe worked out but what else? Do you even have a name?"

"I want it to have the word 'fabulous' in it"

None of them had noticed that Roy had spent the past couple of minutes listening to them until he suddenly spoke: "I got a name!" he said eagerly. "The Inquisifabs!"

Because nobody expects The Inquisifabs.


	16. The Odd Couple

Always Purée

Part 16: The Odd Couple

It was really odd that somebody withdrawn and sensitive like Reggie seemed to have taken some sort of liking to somebody snide and unfriendly like Snape. Much like pretty much everybody else had he before found him to be overall unpleasant to be around and he certainly wasn't attractive enough to get away with it. But then Reggie had become a postulant and the Death Eaters had a system where all postulants were to be mentored by a novice and the novice that had been assigned to mentor Reggie was Snape. And perhaps the reason they had learned to tolerate each others' presence was because they were two lonely souls full of bitter resentment in a world that told them to suck it up. And now Reggie was spending virtually every night in the potions dungeon even when he wasn't being mentored. He chose being criticized for reasons outside his control than scorned for being sent to pride camp.

"It's so unfair!" he complained one evening when frustration was simply boiling over, twisting the neck of a free range chicken. "All kinds of unfair! I've spent my whole life trying to channel my inner malevolence and five minutes at a stupid camp and Sirius is the Dark Lord's new pet? _I MEAN WHAT?!" _He slammed the chicken so hard against the desk that it regained consciousness. He slammed it against the desk again immediately to spare it from suffering. "I've never seen Bella so furious. Not even when he put flesh eating maggots on her face, or when he weaved a replica of her ball gown from fly paper or when he stole her boyfriend… She will kill him I know it"

"Marvelous" said Snape, squeezing chunks of cat hair into compact balls and dropped them into his potion. "Then things will go back to normal"

"Not as long as he is protected by the Dark Lord" Reggie reached into the cage of chickens and twisted the neck of another and tossed it into the bucket beside him. "It's just so infuriating, you know? Always he has to be the better one. Being evil was all I had and now he's taken that too!"

The matagot lied like a beanbag on the floor, cleaning behind its ears after having chased a mouse into a hole in the wall. Snape brushed it some more and squeezed the fur into more compact balls. He didn't like this new change either. Seeing Sirius at school was enough and he had no chance at ever being a better DE because he was just out-pured.

"Why didn't I become more evil?" Reggie asked morose.

"You are already pro-purity, maybe that's why you don't feel different"

"And why would the Dark Lord trade Bella for a newcomer? She's been around longer she's more trustworthy!"

"The Dark Lord thought she was needy, 'though" Snape searched for his note book and started crossing off a check list. When the bucket of chickens was full, Reggie set fire to the poultry and let it burn until only ashes remained. Then he fetched a new bucket and continued twisting necks of chickens.

"I just don't know what to do. I know I should be happy but I just don't like this at all"

Snape put down the note book.

"There's talk. Of earworms" he said.

"They checked the place and didn't find any. And if there were any, why didn't I catch them?"

"I think it's safe to assume that we're not the only ones who don't like this. Maybe you should try to find out if anybody else happens to be actively doing something"

"So what if anyone happens to be actively doing something? The Dark Lord likes him because everybody always thinks he's _so, so great!"_ Reggie squeezed a chicken by the neck so hard the head popped and pieces of its brain hit both surfaces and faces. Snape wiped his face clean with a towel.

"Like I said" he said. "It's probably being taken care of already anyway. But since Gryffindorks tend to be extremely dumb in their heads it might be a good idea to keep an eye on what they're doing and steer them on the right path if necessary"

"You mean helping them?"

"No, not _helping them!" _Snape's voice echoed so loudly the bats escaped their corners searching for an exit. "Certainly not _helping them!_" He was so confused. On one hand, doing the exact opposite of helping would cause the annoying show-offs more misery, on the other he really didn't want Sirius charming the Dark Lord with his naturally cruel ways.

"If the Dark Lord thinks he can benefit-" said Reggie but was cut off mid-sentence, much to his silent irritation.

"The Dark Lord" Snape fished some chicken eyes out of his potion with a ladle. "Doesn't know him like we know him"

"The Dark Lord is a manipulative genious. He knows how to mold a person"

"If he does, why are you as non-malevolent as ever?" Snape rebuffed. "No, of course you're right. The Dark Lord works in mysterious ways. Very, very mysterious ways. Don't worry about it and leave making a mess to the Gryffintwirps, they love that"

It really was best to stay out of this, Snape thought as bats returned to their corners, confident that the Gryffintwirps had it in them to screw up Sirius so badly with their thoughtless attempts to fix him he'd become completely unsuitable to serve the Dark Lord anyway.


	17. The Return Of Aunt Muriel

Always Purée

Part 17: The Return Of Aunt Muriel

The Gryffintwirps had spent the entire weekend reading all they could find on the subject of earworms and the scorching potion and less and less needed they sneak off to talk privately about it because Sirius was rejecting their company more and more in favour of the company of those who agreed with him and whenever they had to work in pairs in class he usually teamed up with Cas.

"I don't think we have a choice" said James dropping some origami cranes that Remus was folding in a potion. "Someone has to scorch his brain"

"I just don't understand what could be wrong with Pomfrey?" Remus tossed another paper crane into the pile of paper cranes. "Did the leech do that?"

They really regretted being unable to not visit Peter, who was still in the hospital wing after the incident with the vicious swan princess, more often, but Sirius's growing insanity was simply a bigger priority.

"Does it matter?" said James, dumping yet another batch of cranes into cauldron. "Maybe they are paying her. People will do a lot for money. Or less, in her case"

"Maybe not… It's just that all the doubt makes me doubt it too but there's just not enough time to check for ourselves to make sure"

"But you know they are lying. We all thought it was really weird to see Aurora scrape in a rotten pendulum box. You didn't take all of them, did you?"

"Of course not. I never take more than two"

"Hm. Nope, that _is _weird"

"It's not weird, it's logical"

"I find the idea of you getting your pets in the mood weird"

"I _don't… _And besides, why would _you _find it weird? Your parents breed Bichon Frisés, that's weirder"

"Exactly and I find it extremely weird to think that you are doing what they are doing when I know what they do. It's kind of like finding out your gran is still at it"

"_What? _You're the weird one. Are you saying I remind you of your gran?"

"Yes you do kind of remind me of my gran"

"Is she very smart and just brilliant?"

"She's very odd and just weird"

It seemed as if they had gotten a bit off topic. The potions recipe actually called for real cranes but since Remus was vegetarian and refused to use any animal products in potions it was very fortunate that they could replace a living crane with paper cranes. But they did need an extremely large amount and it was obvious they would have to spend the second potions hour just folding cranes too.

"So what did you need for the scorching potion? Venus Fly Trap Nectar and what else?"

"Dried liberty caps and chicken ashes"

The ingredient cupboards had a fresh supply of chicken ashes and there were still some dried liberty caps left. All they needed to get before they could begin brewing was the nectar and until the potion was ready they would just have to keep an eye on Sirius and so they thought that it would probably be a good idea to try and make peace with him.

Meanwhile not too far from them had Cas just moved on to one of the final steps which was poaching cocoons for Sirius to squash with a brick on a cutting board.

"So" she said, fishing up a cocoon and placing it on the cutting board. "Now that you've decided to take up Evil, where does that put me?"

"What do you mean?" Splat.

"My mother is a muggle"

"Oh" Another splat. Sirius really hadn't thought that far yet. "She will have to die. You may live as long as you don't fuss and always do as you're told and you won't have any rights"

Cas looked away bashfully. "Oh. So I will basically be a slave, is that is?"

Because he had been so occupied trying to find a bookish Hufflepuff that could find him all the right pages and summarize them whenever he so needed, Sirius hadn't had much time over for anything else. He only just realized how little he really had worked out, but he thought that the slave idea was really good and made sense.

"Yeah"

"Then I will have to have a master" said Cas quickly.

"I guess"

Cas began to fan herself with the recipe. "And if I don't behave I will have to be disciplined?"

"Obviously" Splat.

After fishing up the last cocoon, Cas put down the ladle.

"Why don't you poach your own cocoons?"

"Hello" said James.

Cas swung around and swore. "Damn!"

"Nice to see you too"

"You watch your language!" Sirius pointed a reprimanding wand at Cas, who crossed her arms defiantly.

"Or what?"

"Or… curses! Now go and get more cocoons! To shoo!"

Pouting, Cas left obediently to fetch the ingredient from the cupboards.

"How many times do I have to tell you to take your role playing elsewhere?" said James.

"That wasn't role playing. She's my subordinate now" Sirius put down the brick and gave his full attention to James and Remus, assuming they wanted to fuss some more about those worms.

"Well that's nice" said James. "Yeah, slaves for everyone! Except for the slaves. And death sentenced, but that goes without saying"

Sirius fixed him with a look of suspicion.

"I've been thinking a lot about this" James therefore said. "Just reading the news about all the terrible things in the world and asking myself: whose fault is this? And yeah, I get it now. Muggles suck!"

"Why didn't you realize this until now?"

"It must be your good arguments. And that article in the Prophet this morning? What did it say now?"

"It said that muggles are worthless" said Remus.

"Right! So if muggles are worthless, why should they have rights?"

There were still some uncooked cocoons left to poach. Sirius picked up the ladle.

"Forgive me if I'm not entirely convinced this isn't some scam to spy on me and make sure I don't do something you soppy mollycoddlers don't like"

"What do you want?"

Sirius cast a quick, suggestive glance across the dungeons. James snorted.

"You're right about Lily. She's nothing but a frumpy, holier-than-thou do-gooder with purity envy, clearly just overcompensating by acting pretentious and important"

But apparently Sirius needed a little more convincing, so James went to knock some lose papers out of Lily's hands, told her to go back to Russia and hoped that was enough.

"Alright" said Sirius. "I will give you one chance! But if you let me down…"

"Why would I want to let you down? Anyway, your turn!" James nudged Remus, who had been looking in books at a slight distance, forwards. Having had his pests so hurtfully disrespected had left him a little uncertain.

"My turn what?"

"To prove your loyalty! It's only fair!"

"He hasn't asked me to prove my loyalty!"

"If I had to do it you have to do it"

"Surely you were happy to do it"

"As are you!"

"I really don't think it's up to you to decide whether or not I have to prove any loyalty"

"He's never crushed on any mudbloods as far as I know" said Sirius, squashing the latest poached cocoon.

"But he's a vegetarian" James insisted. "Vegetarians care about living things and stuff!"

"Hitler was vegetarian" Remus pointed out. "Maybe I'm doing it for the environment"

"Exactly. Do you really want someone on your Inquisifabs that fights with _organic dark arts? _Too much carrying stuff around and really not all that evil"

"Organic dark arts? That sounds like evil potatoes" Sirius thought.

"There are plenty of dark plants that look like potatoes that curse the crop and do all kinds of things" said Remus and wondered afterwards why he had simply not said it. Old habits died hard.

"Dark plants" said James. "_Dark plants! _When has a war ever been won with _dark plants?"_

Disrespecting his dark pests and dark plants really set Remus off like a host on a quiz show.

"The Great Sorcerer War of 1312! The Goblin World War of 1463!"

"No modern wars in other words?"

"That depends-"

"Ok fine" Sirius interrupted them both when he got tired of the history lesson. "I know how you can prove your loyalty"

"H-how?"

"You have to kill a house elf"

"_What?" _

"Do you have a problem with that?"

"Well, they never hurt anyone!"

"Would you rather kill a muggle?"

"_No! _Yes. Can't I kill something else?"

"Like what?"

"Like a… house fly?"

"Fine. You have to kill a house fly"

"What if I just trap it in a jar?"

"That was sarcasm. You still have to kill a house elf"

The sheer injustice was just infuriating. "Why do I have to kill a house elf? He didn't have to kill anything!"

But Sirius refused to back down from his demand. Remus couldn't believe the nerve of him for asking for something like that after behaving like such an arse, nor could he understand what he needed his loyalty for anyway. And Sirius wasn't about to tell him right away that he was looking for a particular kind of gross pest.

_Disguising spells _was exactly what it sounded like: it was the combination art of making one spell look like another spell. Through the method of disguising spells was it possible to make for example a very powerful knock-out spell manifest in a green, flashing light. Remus had spent hours looking for spells that caused states resembling death, such as spells that temporarily halted all pulse and breathing. Finding any hadn't been a problem. Finding anything in a book was never a problem because every book was his security blanket. He could find any needed page blind folded at all times because he had been reading so much for most of his life and looked so many things up he knew how information was organized.

No, the problem was mastering the disguising charm. With a lot of practice he was sure to pull it off on an elf within a week, what with all the homework, but he didn't have a week, he had had a couple of hours of which only ten withering minutes remained now. He had so far pulled it off on a fly, a frog, a mouse but he still couldn't tell if the cat was knocked out or just heavily asleep. And although house elves were small, they contained enough magic to make them more immune than animals. He slammed his head against the book, very fatigued and tired from just about everything and the position of the heavenly bodies were not going to work in his favour this week.

"I can play dead" came a squeaky voice suddenly. Remus had to look over the table to see the house elf.

"Can you?" he asked and counted his fingers to see if he was dreaming because his head felt so foggy and he didn't generally talk to house elves a lot.

"You just pretend-cast Avada Kedavra and I will pretend to drop dead"

"But… what about… breathing and pulse?"

"Like I said, I can play dead. Very convincingly"

"But… why are you telling me this?"

But the house elf refused to go into detail and just told him to come along and be done with it.

The door to Professor Slughorn's office enjoyed a colourful make-over. The otherwise dark, iron surface had been covered in messages scribbled with vibrant ink pens directed at mudbloods, asking them to go home. Maybe it was odd to write these messages down in a part of the dungeons mudbloods seldom had reason to be, but as usual had James and Sirius just not thought that far, they wrote them there because that was where they were at the moment. And the artistic outlet that had been intended as a hate crime geared at mudbloods was now mainly comprised of unflattering doodles of wizard-walrus hybrids.

"What if he kicks an anthill?" said James as he doodled a pair of lacy knickers with hearts on one of the werewalruses. "Those poor ants!"

Sirius capped a pen that had run dry and threw it over his shoulder and found him a new one of another colour. "So far nobody has fussed as much as you two. Don't make me make you kill a house elf"

"You can't make me do anything!"

"If you really want to be part of the Inquisifabs I can!"

They dropped some pens as they began pushing each other in the chest.

"If all you do is attack anything _except _muggles maybe I don't want to join your stupid Inquisifabs!"

"Fine! Don't then!"

"On the other hand, I don't think you have what it takes. There, I said it! Obviously you need my help"

"You're really not helping your case"

"All I'm saying is don't treat me like a subordinate because then I will form my own hate club and I will take Moony with me and then potatoes will be lurking around every corner!"  
A rustling sound broke off their bickering and put them on tenterhooks like sudden sounds often did, especially when they were somewhere they weren't supposed to be doing something they weren't supposed to do. When they saw nothing they assumed a couple of rats were probably sneaking around on the floor. Then a silhouette emerged from the shadows and when it got close enough to be illuminated by the lumos they saw that it was a house elf, and Remus was right behind it.

"Hello" he said suppressing a couple of yawns.

"Good choice" said Sirius.

"Well here goes" Remus pretend-cast Avada Kedavra just like he and the house elf had decided and the elf fell flat on its back instantly.

"So you found a way to fake it"

"Several"

Remus was just about to bid them a good night and turn back when Sirius put a wheedling arm around him.

"Potatoes don't lurk, do they?"

"Sorry?"

"Evil potatoes"  
"No. Well, kind of, under soil"

"But _not _behind corners!" Sirius turned back to James. "You stick to your organic dark arts that hasn't won any modern wars!"

"Yeah well I'm sure there's a kind of Monster Turnip that can swallow you whole or something!" James retorted.

"Are you really not going to check if it's dead?" Remus asked disappointed because of all the time he had spent looking for a way to fake it.

"No I'm sure it's really dead" said Sirius. "There are no monster turnips, are there?"

"Not any that can swallow you whole that I know of"

"I see" Sirius spoke softly and with exaggerated fascination. "Well I suppose there's a reason people don't use organic dark arts. Because it's utterly useless"  
"But people do use it and it's not at all useless, it's just risky that's all" He paused to make room of an interruption that never came, and expressions of interest was always a cause for alarm. "Betelgeuse the Ruthless, for example" he went on anyway. This was all in the history books anyway; they could easily look it up themselves even if they often preferred to treat him like an audio book. "He died because his protective gloves hadn't been washed in disinfectant. A single germ is all it takes"

"Is that so? What germ was that?"

"What was it… _Muchcontagia Bacteribilis"_

"And how do you find it or isolate it or whatever?"

"Some magical poultry" _Wait a minute, _Remus finally thought when his foggy head cleared up a bit. Why was Sirius not yawning and calling him a boring nerd already? "It can't be found"

"What about magical poultry?"

"They used to have it in their intestinal flora but then a new species was bred to not have it" Remus lied. "So I don't know if you can find it anywhere anymore"

"But there must be plenty of other sinister germs out there"  
"Sinister germs are really not worth the risk"

Sirius clapped his hands together. "_Well! _I promised I'd give the Dark Lord a hair cut" He called Voldemort _the_ _Dark Lord _ironically. "If you would find me some sinister germs in the meantime, that would be just be marvelous"

"I'll try-" said Remus but was cut off.

"Wait a minute" said James. "Why would you want any _gross pests_?"

Sirius felt like calling James a gross pest. "Oh, _that!" _he chuckled. "That was just…" Then he became serious and turned back to Remus. "I'm sorry. I did mean to call your pets-"

"_Didn't _mean" James corrected him.

"_Didn't _mean, thank you! Your pests- I mean pets, they're not at all gross. Well not all of them. Some are pretty gross. Those shrimp were really disgusting to look at. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so forth. I really like the watery stuff you keep in tanks although they aren't that useful on land. But I once pumped that kraken full of helium and put it in the girls' shower and that was funny"

"Don't… mention it?" said Remus uncertainly.

"I already did. And by the way, you can use my lint remover whenever you want"

Remus froze and looked terror struck down at his squishy cardy, but found nothing. Although he always made sure to brush his clothes so carefully it was all too easy to miss a spot. He searched himself in a slap-happy fashion as if he was covered in fleas. Sirius plucked something from his back.

"Cat hair"

"_Oh"_ Remus would have been relieved had it not been for the recent display of eye catching weirdness. Sirius dropped the cat hair and left to give the Dark Lord that hair cut.


	18. The Scorching Potion

Always Purée

Part 18: The Scorching Potion

A hideous rat sat in a cage chewing on itself. The Beauty Potion was ready and Snape fed it to the rodent with a dropper. After many failed attempts he still had high hopes that this time the rat would grow a new, beautiful coat of fur and lose its growths and skin affections. But those hopes got crushed like so many hopes before after a minute had passed without any sign of change.

"I don't get it" Snape went over his notes for the umpteenth time this evening. Reggie looked up from his homework.

"Maybe that's a beautiful rat by rat standards" he said and received a very condescending glare. "What? I think it's kind of pretty in its own way"

"You are _such _a…" Snape muttered.

"Well excuse me! It is just possible that your potions never work because beauty does come from the inside!"  
"There is plenty of evidence around that show that is not the case" Snape brought the cauldron to the sink to empty it. Reggie tapped with his pen against his notes.

"There are so many love potions" he mused. "But there are no anti-love potions, "Potions for people who don't want to be in love. Sometimes I wonder why that is"

Clanking sounds echoed when Snape rummaged through the cauldron cupboard for a clean

medium sized pewter. He found only one for he had already brought most of them to the scullery.

"Did you work out a theory?" he asked.

"Because it's indestructible" Reggie replied serenely.

Sometimes Reggie could be preciously naïve, although Snape found it irritating rather than precious. And as if he wasn't annoyed enough already his note book decided to run out of blank pages. But because he had expected it to happen he had brought along a blank one in which he continued to tweak the failed recipe.

"You want to be evil but I don't think you're trying very hard" he said.

A fly landed on the table. Reggie picked up a swatter and smashed it to its death, but was left with only a feeling of remorse.

Tonight seemed to be a popular night for after curricular labbing. The doors had opened and closed nonstop all evening and now they opened yet again. The new pair of labbers passed through lab A and went straight to lab B which was separated from the first lab by a partial wall.  
"Well that's the nectar covered" James placed the jar with the orange paste on the work space while Remus fetched some liberty caps and ashes from the cupboards. They had everything they needed and there was nothing left to do than just dive into the brewing process. Getting the nectar had been just as easy as James had predicted and stroking the Monster Venus Fly Trap had rendered it limper than a kitten. Mugwort had unsurprisingly been wrong. James had yet to run into anything that bit that didn't respond to stroking, although admittedly some things could be difficult to get within safe stroking distance but that didn't mean it wasn't theoretically possible.

All the necessary equipment and ingredients were now on the table along with the book with the recipe. Remus opened up the relevant page. "_Mix equal measures of nectar, ashes, liberty caps and water"_ he read.

"Volume or weight?" James asked, already emptying the ashes in a measuring cup.

"Doesn't say. Maybe it doesn't matter if it's equal measures"

"But you don't normally weigh water, but you would weigh dry ingredients. I vote for weighing"

"But water has a lesser volume compared to everything else. Everything else is a lot dryer"

They strummed their fingers against the table. Eventually James was the one to say what nobody really wanted to say:

"It's very important we get this right the first time"

"I know"

"So… Maybe you can go and ask"

"_Me? _Why me?"

"Are you joking?"

Several other potions books towered in a tilting stack. Remus took the second from the top carefully.

"Maybe this one knows. It has all basic rules"  
But his finding ability seemed to have abandoned him for the night. He went over the same pages over and over again, trying not to rush it but to no avail. He looked through a couple of other books.

"Go on!" James gave Remus a push towards Lab A. "Just picture him in a frock"

"_You _picture him in a frock!"

"Will you stop hanging around? This is important!"

Remus ventured into Lab A very reluctantly, thinking that surely he was already suffering enough with the head fogginess and itchy molars. This was not the state he wanted to be in when he had to do unpleasant things. Snape didn't seem to notice him awkwardly approaching at all, busy finely chopping up a noose as he was. He tried to get his attention by first knocking on the table.

"Good evening" he said. But Snape remained unwilling to take any notice to him.

"Hi" said Reggie before thinking and felt yet again like he had failed a test of his evilness. He cursed himself silently.

Looking at all the ingredients that Snape was using, Remus was sure you couldn't find half of it in the school cabinets. He tried for his own amusement to try and figure out what was in the making, but quickly realized it was hopeless and wondered if he ought to attempt small talk or just cut to the chase.

"What are you making?" he asked, trying to sound so, so polite. But Snape was still perpetually disinterested in partaking in a conversation.

"Beauty potion" said Reggie because he just didn't have the heart to ignore anybody who wasn't a muggle, and he had not too long ago learned that he wasn't capable of ignoring them either, but when Snape shot him a murderous glare he corrected himself instantly: "I mean: Boo, Gryffindor sucks!" But saying that still failed to bring him any sense of satisfaction. He felt so bad he even apologized.

"Look" said Snape, breaking the ignoring treatment. "You don't like me and I don't like you"

"I like you" said Remus innocently.

"Shut up. What do you want?"

"Equal measures. Is that volume or weight?"

"That depends on what you're making"

If he could tell Snape what they were making, that was the question. But he was trying to cut down on lying.

"We're trying to make scorching potion"

"They searched the place and didn't find any earworms"  
"I found them"  
"If it was earworms, how come some were unaffected?"

"It did end a bit prematurely. It seems like only one half was affected"

A fly landed on the cutting board. Snape split it into equal halves with his knife with amazing precision and dropped them in a small pot of sugar syrup on a portable stove. He always had so much on his work space, but he organized it all in such a way it didn't look crowded. And he always seemed to be doing a hundred different steps at the same time.

"Volume. You can go away now"

And Remus did go away without any objections, exhausted from the Snape-anxiety.

"Did you get an answer?" James asked.

"Volume" Remus took a measuring cup and filled it with water.

"If it's reliable that's the question" James uncorked the nectar and used it to fill up another measuring cup.

"Trust is a choice" Remus poured the water into the cauldron and turned on the portable stove. James scooped the sticky and thick nectar out of the measuring cup into the water with a spoon.

"That wasn't so bad now was it? No shouting and no jinxing, well done"

"Maybe you should try it sometime. You might like it"

The liberty caps came in a large bag of flakes. Remus filled up the same measuring cup he had used for water and added that next and once the ashes had been dumped in the mixture it was ready to be heated to a temperature of 700 degrees. James twiddled a thermometer.

"Is that Fahrenheit or Celsius?"

"Celsius _is _the standard"  
"Yes but usually they put a little 'c' to avoid confusion. But this book is clearly trying to be as unspecific as possible"

"It has to be Celsius. It has always been the standard"

"But look" James showed him the back of the cover. "Printed in America"

"Well. I would definitely guess…"

"No guessing allowed! Go and picture him in a frock!"

"What is it with you and frocks? Do you have some frock issue?"

"You're the one who was desperate to go as Aurora, you're the one with frock issues"

"Do you really want to talk specific articles of clothing and relating personal issues?"

"No I want you to go and picture him in a frock"

"I don't think so I'm already feeling a little queasy"

"Fair enough" James put his hands together. "Pleeeease? You're so good at asking nicely"

"Listen to you, asking so nicely! You know, if you asked him _really, really nicely _it just might blow his mind"

"Oh come on. I know it sucks. If you accidentally bite his head off I can place some DNA of your choice on a serrated knife and make it look like an accident"  
He could say it but did he mean it, Remus wondered as he left to awkwardly approach Snape and offer to be a verbal punch bag a second time. He knocked on the table first for attention just like before.

"Hello again" he said apologetically.

This time Snape wasted no time on giving him the silent treatment and fixed him with a piercingly icy stare.

"Quickquestion. The book doesn't specify scale of temperature. The book is American so we were wondering back there if they meant Fahrenheit or Celsius"

"I thought you paid attention in class"

Snape always knew where to poke. Accusing him of not paying attention in class, he could have run a pole of shame through his chest just as well. Remus filtered his mind but could not recall that it had ever been covered.

"Fahrenheit" Snape turned his attention back to his potion.

"Thank you-"  
"Leave"

Hopefully there'd be no need for asking any more questions. It was irritating to think that if the potions book had been more specific they would have finished for the night by now and not kept being delayed by arguments about frocks.

"Fahrenheit" said Remus upon returning to lab B and stuck a thermometer in the potion and kept the rising scale under a close watch. James looked over the instructions.

"_When temperature has reached 700 degrees Fahrenheit- _I'm joking, it just says degrees- _Set timer on one and a quarter minutes"_

Waiting for the temperature to rise seemed easy enough for them to handle on their own. They waited in silence while the degrees climbed slowly higher on the thermometer and after ten minutes when the temperature had reached 700 it was time to check with the instructions again. It said to let boil a quarter and a half minute, cool down to -700 and then spiral stir for 30 minutes and 3 seconds.

"Is that clockwise or counter clockwise?" James asked. "Any qualified guess?"

But Remus didn't need to be bickered into Lab A this time, nor did he bother timidly knocking on the table.

"Hi again!"

"_You're back?"_ Snape didn't know why he asked as if he couldn't believe it when he could believe it.

"I sure am!"

"How unprepared are you over there? Didn't you read through everything beforehand and write down all uncertainties?"

"Stuff came up I suppose"

"Perhaps that would be asking too much of Gryffintwirps" Snape stirred in his potion and pretty tracks formed on the surface.

"Probably. Stuff comes up quite a lot up there"

"Meaning you screw up and then you screw up some more"

"A lot of the time maybe"

Potions was Remus' second weakest subject (his weakest subject being physical education) mainly because he was a vegetarian and refused to use any animal products in potions (and brew immoral things like Love Potions, that was just messed up) which resulted in him missing out on many potions that were necessary to master to get the higher marks. But he really enjoyed watching other people brew. They made it looks so therapeutic, like fishing, another activity he didn't allow himself but sometimes wanted to. But Snape didn't enjoy having an audience much and paused in his brewing activities.

"Did you want something?"

"Clockwise or counter clockwise?"

"Clockwise. Obviously"

"Thanks again. You know I really-"

"Are you done?"

"_Don't _interrupt me!"

"Or what?"

"Or I'll hug you"

Snape was too befuddled to form a coherent thought.

"Yeah it's pretty rude" said Reggie, packing his homework because it was getting rather late. "Interrupting somebody mid-sentence"

The coherent thought that had begun to sprout in Snape's brain was blown out the window of his mind by a breeze of more befuddlement.

"Go ahead" said Reggie.

But being not only befuddled but also forgetful, Remus had forgotten what he was going to say.


	19. A Trade Up

Always Purée

AP 19: A Trade Up

Another way to describe the sound of apparition was to compare it to the sound of a hair dresser cape being removed from a customer. A low ranking Death Eater came running from his corner to pick up the cape from the floor and hoover the bits of cut hair, all as anonymously and unnoticeably as possible. Sirius passed the Dark Lord a mirror. Voldemort had only asked for a low maintenance trim but Sirius had just failed to resist rubbing a bunch of mousse in it.

"Ta-da!"

The Dark Lord tried to hold the mirror in such a way so he could see his hair from the side.

"Products are so time consuming…" he complained but was pleased with the results.

"That will take you five, ten minutes at most"

"It will not. I will have to get up an hour earlier for this kind of blow dried fluffiness"

Sirius rolled his eyes and packed his equipment back into his kit. "You're welcome…"  
The Dark Lord spun around in his chair. "How long does yours take?"

"I don't even have to wash it. I just do because I like the feeling" Sirius gave his hair the trade marketed Shwella-shake and said the slogan from the advert: "_Because it's good for me!"_

_Show off, _Voldemort thought and got off the chair and put down the mirror before taking his place behind his large desk.

"Anyway" he said. "You do realize that nothing escapes me. I have eyes and ears everywhere"

"Of course" Sirius pushed the rolling turny chair towards the low ranking servant so he'd take care of it. "Anything less would be disappointing"  
"You forming your own persecution group makes me question your sincerity"

"So? You're the one who was desperate to have me"

Voldemort leaned back and patted his knee so his pet snake would come and lie on his lap, but the serpent wasn't interested and shambled through the snake-flap in the door. He sighed.

"There are certain things I'm not willing to compromise. However, how does 'franchising' sound to you? You'd have a little more freedom, a little more power but you'll still be my subordinate. Call your group something else and on the surface it will look like you're offering an alternative to my Eaters and attract another kind of people while in reality you'll all be serving me. And if you screw up you will get all the blame and my Eaters won't get any crap for it"  
"Well that sounds like a trade up" Sirius sat down across from Voldemort. If he was going to do a poor job pretending he had any interest in being loyal, having more power and freedom could hardly be a bad thing. Voldemort opened a pretty wooden box of self-lighting unicorn cigarettes and offered one to Sirius. Unicorns, what part couldn't be consumed one way or another? Their horns made great ice cream cones and their hair had a very soothing effect. Evil vegetarians loved them because they needed not be killed for their horns and hair, but they still were because they were quite noisy when they were in agony.

"I'm offering this as an alternative to try and rival me" said Voldemort, blowing a noodle of white smoke.

"Are you that afraid I will succeed?"

"No, but I would have to kill you and all of your friends, and I'd prefer it if you helped me expand my organization. That would be a better use of you. This way you can wear whatever you want"

"And what about the tattoos?"

"I'm sure you know how to operate a powder box"  
Sirius really didn't want a tattoo. "What if we do the costume but no tattoos?"

"No"  
At first Sirius had thought that he'd be able to talk his way out of the tattoo part considering how willing Voldemort had been to sacrifice a veteran Eater for him, but that did no longer seem to be the case. This was a new experience because he was used to getting his way. He tried to blow a ring but unicorn smoke was just too thin.

"And my followers, will they have to get tattoos?"  
"No, just you. Just you will know they're really serving me and not you"  
Although Sirius certainly didn't like the sound of that, it was still a trade up however he looked at it.


	20. Malign Germs

Always Purée

Part 20: Malign Germs

Monday metamorphosed like a butterfly into Tuesday and Transfiguration class contained no Transfiguration at all that morning but a film about tolerance called _Rings _that illustrated how extremist groups were formed and how they worked.

"So you see" said McGonagall, putting the light back on. "Anybody can become a part of an extremist group. Group pressure is a powerful thing. And extremism spreads like _rings _on water" McGonagall gave a couple of rhetorical nods. "Any questions?"

Nobody had a question for her, not even Miss Goody. Extremist and non-extremist alike had found the movie to be stupid and boring and thought that it did not apply to them.

"Writing hate messages on walls just creates an unpleasant atmosphere. Whoever did it probably thought it was just a bit of fun, but it can take on serious consequences. First ink pens, blood next. Students have died because of extremism. So if you know anybody that you suspect has fallen in with a bad crowd or is having thoughts about doing so, have them seek help. They may not admit to it, they may not even realize it themselves, but in the back of their heads they know it's wrong and they carry a lot of fear and insecurity within themselves. So it's not pointless to seek help for another. And if you witness any kind of hate crime, even if it's just messages on walls, report to a professor"

Professor McGonagall removed the roll of film from the projector and told her students to spend the rest of the class writing a 20 pages long essay about what they had just been forced to watch.

With the increase of independent study hours as the big exams drew nearer came competition for the best seats in the library. The students that knew of few or no short cuts rushed out of the class room to claim one of the more desirable spot. Most of them, in other words.

"So" said Sirius, one of the lingering. "Have you found any germs?"

"Nope not yet" Remus replied as he packed his things together. It was a good thing he didn't have a lot of choice in the matter of what to do today because he'd just be conflicted between sleeping all day and occupying himself as much as possible, both desirable options for they provided distraction from unpleasant things, both undesirable options because they made time go faster. And both would draw unwanted attention to him; if he kept to himself people wondered about that, if he was out among people they always thought he was coming down with a fever and told him to go lie down anyway.

"You haven't?"

Some short cuts required nothing more than pushing through a wall and then voila, you were in an entirely different part of the school. The classroom where McGonagall held her classes had one such wall that led to the library conveniently enough, a wall that had been placed there not terribly long ago.

"No" said Remus when he was unpacking again in the library. "I mean there are so many to choose from, but not one that is just right"  
"Have you found any that are almost right?"

"No" Remus picked up a book called _Malign Germs, _but it was really _Potions for beginners. _He looked pained and kept stopping himself from scratching his arms as if he was inflicted with mosquito bites.

"You don't look too well" said Sirius.

"Have you looked anything yourself?" James asked him.

"No. I _have _been kind of busy" Sirius searched the shelves a little. "Need I remind you that my work is for the good of society?"

"Germs are very small, 'though. Probably difficult to find for anybody"

But Sirius wasn't convinced that Remus wasn't willfully refusing to find anything. After all, if he could find those shrimp, six ways to fake murder within two hours of researching, three needles in a collective of haystacks of the Shuffling Trickster Ant and misplaced keys, finding a suitable germ could hardly be his greatest finding challenge so far.

"Why are you so keen on germs?" Remus asked.

"Because it sounds handy" said Sirius. "You release them and then you can go home"

Suddenly a little bored, Sirius took it out on the grounds outside the window by non-verbally blowing up pieces here and there.

"Think of the badgers!" said Remus horrified because the grounds had a lot of burrows. "And how do you expect me to concentrate with that noise?"

Sirius's ring dressed hand suctioned at Remus's forehead like an alien starfish, because Remus did not have concentration problems. He hadn't noticed a thing when a group of stone giants were on a demolishing spree at Hogwarts a couple of years ago and tore down among other things the library walls while he was researching spriggan care and when he finally did notice that the walls around him had fallen down in ruins (because wind kept flicking pages for him all of a sudden and that was annoying) he thought it was because the foundation hadn't been properly maintained due to financial cut backs.

"You're a little warm. Maybe you should keep away from the germs. Don't worry about it" said Sirius and blew up some more ground.

"Didn't you Moony mention that special _ventilation system germ?" _James asked.

Remus hesitated because he did not at all recall ever mentioning such a germ. "May…be?"

"Airborne and just loves the warmth of a ventilation system and the material?"

"Aha? That… rings a bell… At least I think it's a bell…"

"What was it called now? _Ventivilivirae Systemibacterii?"_

"That's… exactly…it. Yeah now I remember. Great for enclosed areas"

"You should find _that _germ and then we can get a bunch of muggles into an enclosed area and kill them all that way!"

"…Brilliant…"

"How fast can you find that germ?" Sirius asked.

"Erm when do you need it?"

"As soon as possible"

"I can probably find it… this week…"

"But I don't want it to interfere with you helping your Aunt Muriel with her mad cats. Cats are sensitive creatures!"

"It really won't. She can't clean out her house boat so it's full of germs anyway"

Sirius shook his head disapprovingly. "When I have some time over you and I will have to rescue those cats. Some people herd cats and it's not always pretty"

"Oh it's no big deal when it all… floods over…Besides they're also ghosts" And there was a perfectly good lie ruined. Sirius went from looking disapproving to looking what-are-you-crazy-why-would-you-help-a-ghost-with-ghost-cats, because that was what he was thinking, baffled at some of the things some people did for their Aunts, ghosts or not.

"Alright, then" Sirius got off the table. "Well I better go and proof read the school paper before they print it. Ta" He gave the grounds one last subterranean blow just for the joy of blowing things up before leaving.

"Does that germ exist?" Remus asked.

"You tell me" said James.

"You haven't turned evil too, have you?"

"I was thinking, what if we get a bunch of muggle criminals that deserve to die to an enclosed area?"

"So you think you are qualified to decide who gets to live or die?"

"But I don't mean the odd shop lifter and drug abuser. I'm talking rapists and child molesters"

Although it sure sounded noble, it didn't make Remus more alacritous. "I think the muggles can take care of their own criminals"

"But if he gets ideas from you, the better! That way we can still control things and it's better than having him blowing up random muggles in the streets, don't you think?

It was better than blowing random muggles up in the street but an even better alternative would be to simply find a useless germ and tell Sirius to go home.


	21. Where Were You Last Night

Always Purée

Part 21: Where were _you _last night?

Tuesday became Good Friday in a wink of an eye. The scorching meeting that was supposed to have taken place April 14 had been postponed to April 16. Cas was getting dressed. She stood in front of a mirror trying to decide between a bubblegum pink top with bubble gum patterns and a fuchsia blouse with fuchsia embroideries.

"You're mum is a muggle, Cas" said Mac. She was sitting on her bed unable to do homework because her cat was lying on top of it on her lap.

"I know" said Cas. "And roaches are just born that way" She put down both garments on her bed. "Since it is Good Friday maybe I should wear yellow. But I don't have a lot of yellow in my wardrobe"

"You don't have a lot of anything that isn't pink"

"Mac can I borrow that top with the yellow and orange stripes with the long sleeves?"

"Sure. I just have to…" Mac searched for something to lure away Ceres with.

"It's ok I got it" said Cas, already going though Mac's drawers. The neatly folded tops became a jumbled mess. Cas put a lose page from a news paper she found among the articles of clothing on top of the drawers and didn't bother to shut it when she found the top she wanted.

"So you're quite content with being a slave, then?" Lily asked. Cas sighed dreamily as she envisioned herself chained to a dungeon in a skimpy outfit. "I mean, what if you get to be a fat guy's slave?" said Lily.

Cas shot her an icy stare. "Sirius wouldn't do that to me!"

"Are you sure? You don't have any rights. Maybe he'll make Raquel Welch his slave and let you be some fat guy's slave"

Suddenly Cas's cat decided it wanted to nap on her tops. She fetched the lose article, intending to place it on top of the clothing to protect them from cat hair when the content caught her interest. She sat down on her bed to read through it. When she had finished reading she glanced suspiciously at Lily.

"Meanwhile, where were _you _Wednesday night?" she asked accusingly.

"I told you. St Mungos had Open House Day"

"Aha…" Cas glanced over the article again, trying to decide if that qualified as an embellished excuse. She searched for her calendar. "That was convenient. And just _where _were you March 16?"

"I don't remember! What happened March 16?"

"Of course you don't"

"Cas, you really can't trust those things" said Mac, taking the lose article and ripping it to pieces.

"I know. _Those things_ are really sneaky" Cas agreed, still refusing to retract her suspicious stare.

"No, I mean that these deduce-yourself articles aren't very reliable. And it is very unlikely that you will find any werewolves at Hogwarts"

"I guess you're right" Cas took the top and pulled it over her head in front of the full length mirror and checked to see how it fit from different angles. Then she suddenly directed her suspicion at Mac.

"Where were _you _Wednesday night?"

"I was with you, Cas. Remember? You made me eat buckets of ice cream because Sirius told you your trousers looked a little tight"

"Yeah. And would you say you '_don't put on weight easily', _end quote?" Cas pulled down the top that kept sliding up her stomach.

"Yes I would. I also turn slightly blue when it rains and love to hang out at chicken farms"

"Do you, now?" Cas turned back her attention to the Who-is-the-fairest-of-all mirror. "It's just a little suspicious that you kept that article hidden away in your drawers when Janine complained this morning about the coupon page constantly missing from her Prophets"

"Maybe you should go with your purple top. That one looks a little tight on you" Mac cast the _Firework of Feathers _charm in an attempt to offer Ceres something more entertaining than napping on her homework, but to no avail. The cat just started attacking the wand.

Cas stuck her tongue out and summoned her hair brush. "Anyway, if anybody will end up a fat guy's slave it will be you, Lily, and that's if you're lucky"

"I'd rather go to Russia than be a fat guy's slave" said Lily.

After making sure that her hair was just right and that she didn't have anything between her teeth, Cas was ready to meet up with the other Inquisifabs.

"Anyway, I really ought to dash now, ladies. Are you sure you don't want to come along?"

"No I have homework" said Mac.

"I don't think I'd be welcome" said Lily.

"Would you want to be welcome?"

"I don't know, maybe"

"Didn't that film teach you anything?"

Lily shrugged. "That film oversimplified things. I was thinking, if muggles are worthless, why should they have rights?"

"I don't think you're invited but I'll put in a good word for you" said Cas, pushing through the door hips first.


	22. Have You Ever Been Mellow

Always Purée

Part 22: Have You Ever Been Mellow

When school started again after Easter all decorations were gone. No Prophets had been delivered during the holiday. The scheme with the useless germs had gone as predicted; Remus had given to Sirius on the Good Friday afternoon a germ he said would cause insufferable deaths and told him to release it in any ventilation system of his choice and then go home, when in reality the germ did nothing more than put you to sleep. He hadn't expected it to do more than buy time but when Sirius dropped a muggle newspaper on top of his homework he wished that it would have bought a little more time. The headline read: _House in Perth offers free booze, bunch of drunks lose consciousness._

"Oops?" said Remus.

"Consider yourself out" said Sirius.

"It was a mistake"

"No it wasn't"

It was unusual for Sirius to be up early in the morning before class. But he had acted more unusual than usual since the incident at the camp. It was hard to tell whether or not it was just another symptom or if he just felt so strongly for the Inquisifabs that it helped motivate him to get out of bed. Breakfast wasn't even served yet and Remus hadn't spent ten minutes in the library before the article had been dropped on top of his homework.

Perhaps it was just as well he was kicked out. Sirius would probably not fall for the useless germ trick a second or third time.

"Fine" Remus shoved the article off his homework. Sirius picked it up and rolled it together.

"And I suggest you don't try to give anybody sneaky ideas"

"I definitely won't"

"Good. Then I definitely won't ask where _you _were Wednesday night"

When Sirius was back outside the library and heading nowhere in particular, he ran into James who also had a nose stuck in a book about dark germs. Seeing him up early in the morning was also unusual, and seeing him with his nose stuck in a book slightly less unusual but unusual all the same.

"Here's a vicious germ!" he said excitedly. "_Cruciafili Crulae, _makes the victim attack itself with shears"  
"We're done with germs" said Sirius.

"Why? It's the perfect solution"

"I've already been stabbed in the back one time already. How can I be sure you won't just get me a _Cuddlybacti Sweeteheete?"_

Sirius's temper was really worst in the morning. This early when it was still quiet the acoustic was really noticeable.

"…Mistakes happen-" said James but was cut off.

"Defend him and you're out too"

More and more early birds began to slowly but surely come down the stairs, chatting quietly.

"But come on" said James, trying not to talk too loudly. "Organic dark arts!"

"Yeah. Useful in concealers, I'm sure" Sirius rolled up the Prophet.

"What?"

"Let's just say I figured out that _juicy secret!"_

"Did you?"

"Wasn't very hard, mind you. The fatigue, the avoidant behaviour, the foul mood, the obsession with transvestitism, _it all fits!"_

"Does it?"

"But _this" _ Sirius showed to James an article about a cross-dresser getting into a pub brawl. "He moonlights as a drag artist! It fits! It explains the scratches and everything! Every once in a while he performs as Olivia Newton John at the Hamrider Pub in Wizard's Melrose"

"So… he's a drag queen?" In an odd way James actually found it more plausible than both the ghost of Aunt Muriel and the truth. Remus did hum Olivia Newton John tunes a lot when he thought nobody was listening.

"Of _course _he's a drag queen! Don't pretend you didn't know that"  
"I just can't believe it…"

"Seriously, don't bother"

"As _Olivia Newton John?"_

"You're not fooling anybody, you know!"

Now that the prophet had outlived its use, Sirius tossed it next to a bin.

"Well so what if he's a drag artist?" James asked. "I thought you were tolerant, you always insist you're so _very _LGBT"

"That's entirely different. Wearing women's clothing… Pfft, makes me sick!" Sirius spat on the floor with disdain.

"You're wearing women's trousers right now"  
"Just because I got them in a department that had a big sign saying 'Women' does it mean they are women's trousers. They're _my _trousers. And women wouldn't even be wearing trousers if they hadn't at one point gotten trouser envy and made a big fuss about trousers! What I don't understand is, if they are inferior, why do they have nicer trousers?"

Generally acting weird aside, Sirius intolerance towards drag artist was one of his weirdest symptoms yet because he loved cross dressing and he always tried to get them all to cross dress at Halloween parties.

"That's a good question" said James. "In any case, now's the time to take advantage of your knowledge and milk him on the evil facts. He won't try anything sneaky again now. All we are saying, give germs another chance!"  
"Why are _you _such a fan of dark germs?"

"Because! More free time! Release and go home! I had to kick four players from the team for having too much muggle in them so I am up to here with tryouts. Dark germs would really suit my active lifestyle. _Pleeease?"_

Because Sirius had never been able to say no to those Bambis, he reluctantly agreed to give germs a second chance, _but just one!_


	23. Cas's Musical Porno

Always Purée

AP 23: Cas's Musical Porno

The second time they went with James's idea of relocating a selected number of muggle criminals to an enclosed area. After arguing about how many would be enough they eventually decided that 20 would be enough to relocate to a shabby movie theatre that Sunday. Then Remus returned to Hogwarts to mind the potion, so in that sense it had been a good thing that he had been kicked out while James stayed with the Inquisifabs.

The Inquisifabs was within only a couple of weeks since its foundation already approaching three digits. It wasn't just for students, but also for teachers and citizens of Hogsmead so there were still plenty more members to recruit.

The criminals in the movie theatre had been told they were there to partake in an experiment that involved watching while shackled to their seats a live action musical Alice in Wonderland porno wearing baseball caps that they were told were used to register brain activity.

"Shame we can't see it" said James. He and some other Inquisifabs from the same class were hanging out in the lobby while other Inquisifabs were inside the theatre handing out the baseball caps.

"You've seen it twice" said Sirius, fiddling with the naughty sweets assortment. A stunned ticket vendor lied stunned on the floor.

"I know. The songs are pretty bad, 'though"

"Not _that _bad. Not great, but it's not the worst musical ever made"

Cas sat behind Sirius on the counter, giving him a back rub.

"I don't understand why anybody would think a musical porno would be a good idea" she said, giving Sirius's back a good chopping. "I mean, this film is clearly intended for straight blokes and I don't mean to stereotype, but-"

"So don't"

"Where are the musical pornos for women? That would make more sense"

"Make your own" said Mac. "I don't know why I said that"

"Maybe I will… Maybe I can use that song that a certain somebody still owes me"

"If your musical porno takes place in the kitchen you could" said Sirius.

"Kirk and Spock in the Starship Enterprise kitchen…" Cas pondered.

"You're going to turn one of your fanfictions into a musical porno?" Mac asked. "You don't even _like _Star Trek!"

But Cas just smiled enigmatically. Two Inquisifabs came to announce that every criminal was now wearing a cap and asked for permission to release the germs just when the conversation about Cas's musical porno got interesting.

It didn't matter if the muggle criminals deserved what was coming to them, Remus was still happy he didn't have to be in the same building when it happened. The potion had been left untouched for 13 days precisely and after making sure everything looked right it was time to bring it to the second phase. The next step read: _Pour a layer of oil, 1 millimeter thick._ So this book used both Fahrenheit and metric. No wonder it had been taken out of production. Remus continued reading: _Set fire to the oil without touching it with the matchstick. _

The third batch of questions surfaced already and he hadn't been in lab B for ten minutes yet. Did it mean that he had to set fire to the oil with a matchstick, and would any oil do? The cabinets had several common oils and a couple of weird ones and Remus was unable to pick any of them. He had already bothered Snape twice tonight and he really knew where to poke. When Lily suddenly dropped into Lab B and began unpacking her things next to Remus he thought that he'd be spared from more humiliation.

"Hello" she said and peeked into his cauldron, trying to see what he was making. "Scorching potion. That's pretty advanced stuff"

"Do you know if you have to use any specific oil for this?"

"I know you think it is earworms" said Lily, unscrewing several jars of different ashes. "Can you be sure, 'though? Not everyone in the Inquisifabs were at the camp"

"You saw the film. If not earworms, then what?" This constant doubt he was met with was really beginning to grate on him and he could tell from the patterns the fume formed on the sides that he didn't have a lot of time for small talk.

"Maybe society needs purifying" said Lily. "Just because some people have to die doesn't mean it's wrong"

Was she joking? "I've heard lots of good things about Bear Claws" said Remus, browsing through _Basic Potions _although he had read it twice and knew he wouldn't find the answer, but he didn't have higher hopes for any of the other books he had brought with him.

"I can't go to Russia. Impuring another place is not the solution. Perhaps I should be more bothered, but I think it was my quick visit to St Mungos that brought me this inner piece. Hospitals really put things in perspective"

_Potions 101 _didn't have the answer, nor did _Brewing for dummies _and _Common brewing problems. _

"What were you doing at St Mungos?" Remus asked, giving _Answers you won't find elsewhere _another chance but his finding mojo was still evading the potions dungeons.

"Their Healing School had this open house thing. I'm just no good with large buildings, I get lost so easily. Somehow I wandered into the contamination department and accidentally knocked a jar from a table. Don't know how long it took me to find the way out again. And how loud are some clocks? It felt like the noise haunted me everywhere. Anyway, you really shouldn't be making that. If there is just one chance it's not earworms, and most of us don't think it is, it's just unnecessarily risky"

If Remus had thought he'd be spared from further humiliation he had been wrong, but at least he was no longer uncertain.

Meanwhile the rise of the Inquisifab was the subject of conversation of the brewers in Lab A. Reggie put down the latest issue of Hognews that bore the headline: _Being pro-purity is no longer just for miserable gits!_

"It's a little bit provoking, but I suppose marketing really is everything" he said.

"Having fluffy hair is everything" said Snape, gutting a slug angrily.

"No. My fluffy hair has never gotten me anything"

"Maybe you're not posing correctly"

Collecting the diced slug and dropping the pieces into his potion, Snape saw that Remus was back for the third time tonight.

"_You _again? You're just hopeless!"  
"It's why I need you" said Remus, fiddling with the book he had finally remembered to bring with him.

Snape diced some more slugs. "It's like you're doing it on purpose, just to annoy me"

"Maybe I'm just subconsciously looking for an excuse to talk to you"

Snape stuck the sharp slug knife in the cutting bored forcefully. "Don't forget that I don't have to help you so stop wasting my time with your stupidity"

"_Fine!" _Remus slammed the book on the table. "What oil?"

"Doesn't matter"

"Does it have to be matches?"

"Yes it does"

"And is it mix thoroughly for five _minutes, _or for five _minuets?"_

Snape looked at him with painful disappointment, which was odd considering disappointment implied expectation.

"Minutes, right?" Remus said. "I thought it was a typo but you never know-"

"Can you read?"

"Yes I can"

Snape was still staring at him reprehensively. Remus cleared his throat.

"Or is it in fact minuets?"

"I've never taken you for very smart but I thought you could spell"

"So, minutes? Minuets?" The urge to bite Snape's head off began to rise but Remus calmed himself, well aware that Snape was only trying to get a rise out of him. "Will you please just tell me?"

"_Minuets? Seriously?"_

"What? I've encountered weirder"

"Was it in a mirror?"

"So, minutes_"_

"_How _do you mix something thoroughly for five _minuets?"_

"I _thought- _Ok. Minutes"

"It's minuets"

"Minuets?"

"No, of _course _it's minutes!"

"Do you mean that?"

"Yes I mean that! You won't have to dance five minuets for your potion, but you can if you want"

"I wasn't going to. I thought it would be enough to just play five minuets for it on a gramophone"

Snape put his palm to his face, exhausted from this imbecilic discussion. He had never been one to claim there was no such thing as stupid questions. Remus corrected the error in the book and looked over the page for more uncertainties noted in the margins.

"Does it have to be today's horoscope?"

"No, as long as it's from this week" The diced slugs hissed when Snape salted them. Remus thought he had had more questions but it seemed like he had covered them all. He thanked Snape for his cooperation before leaving. Snape released the knife from the board and began dicing slugs again. An ordinary clock ticked and a pen rustled against a note pad in the otherwise silent lab that all of a sudden felt kind of empty.


	24. The Cosmospacists

Always Purée

Part 24: The Cosmospacists

Monday morning offered in the Prophet a small paragraph about a mysterious killing of muggles in a movie theatre, a paragraph most readers didn't notice because it was written in a very small print on the page for muggle news which most wizards found to be generally uninteresting. Sirius rolled it together and tossed over a bin on his way to charms class when he saw another newspaper he would have paid no attention to, had the bold headline not been so clearly visible to him and reading: _Bunch of criminals die mysteriously at porn viewing. _He took the muggle newspaper out of the bin to read the full article.

"_Bla, bla, bla" _he read. "'_Is this the work of a super hero?' _Did you do this?"

"Muggles _died" _said James.

"Yeah! _Bad _muggles!"  
"They're _all _bad, what's the difference?"

"The difference is that _you're _making a difference!"

"So what if I make a difference? The important thing is that muggle scums _died!"_

Sirius tossed the news paper over his shoulder. "You're doing things behind my back! You're out!"

"Oh, come on! It won't happen again, honest! All I am saying is give me one more chance!"

Sirius was just furious but at the same time he just couldn't say no to those hazel-y Bambis. He was willing to offer James one more chance, _just one!_

Foil-wearing cult-members mingled in the drawing room of their headquarters.

"Always nice to meet new members" said a Cosmospacist that had introduced himself as Kolob.

"Yes, nice to be here" said Roy, with a gloved hand swirling a glass of something that made him feel a little strange in the head. "What's it about again? Aliens?"

Mac excused herself as she squeezed through them to deliver a message to the small group of Inquisifabs that hung out by a Grand Piano making Monty Python references.

"Germs have been released" she told them. Roy joined them and the Inquisifabs raised their glasses of that strange drink that made them feel strange in the head for a toast when suddenly a shrill, ringing sound filled the entire room, making the walls shake.

"The fire alarm?" Rita asked.

"Fire? I don't smell any smoke" said Roy.

"Everybody spread out for a search" said Sirius and the followers abided and left to inspect the headquarters. Knowing that the house had a decently large room of books and also just where it was, instinct drove Sirius to search there. And his instincts were right; he found the suspected culprit immediately. There was Remus trying to fit an enormously enormous book called _The Mind and Magic _though a much smaller window that clued Sirius in on just how he had gotten inside. A red box bearing the word 'Fire alarm' in clear, white letters sat to the right of the door and the glass was broken and an ax lied on the floor. Sirius cast the Avada Kedavra on the book, shattering it into disintegrating pieces.

"Did you come alone?" he asked.

"Yeah. Honestly. Somebody has to mind the- quidditch.

Not only did somebody had to mind the potion, James had also opposed trying to stop the Cosmospacist from being killed, arguing that it would be pushing their luck because Sirius was already well sick of germs. But Remus thought that it didn't matter how weird Cosmospacist were, they didn't deserve to die, at least not all of them. Sirius fondled his bracelet that he had found in a magpies nest in the Green Witch Park in central Hogsmead after much searching.

"Did you ever find out if a bracelet can be a wand?" he asked.

"Not telling you"

Sirius closed in on Remus some more, still fondling the bracelet.

"What's the difference between a foundation and a concealer?"

Remus fingered his collar. "How should I know?"

"Aha! You're not a drag artist!"  
"No I'm not" The bracelet began to make Remus's breathing wheezy. "I mean yes I am"

"Why would a drag artist recoil at my bracelet?" Sirius neared him some more and Remus sunk down on his knees, wheezing and itching all over and with an increasingly stabbing pain in the chest.

"Because it's _so _two decades ago?"

"Five decades ago"

Taking the wand from Remus was like taking candy from him. He coughed and gasped for air. Sirius twirled his two wands around.

"Now the question is what to do with you? You've been getting in my way more than enough. Give me one reason why I shouldn't just let the Dark Lord have you, if he wants you at all?"

Remus clutched his throat. "Notes?" he wheezed.

It was true that he was great at taking notes, Sirius thought, And not only at taking notes but also at doing homework.


	25. The Chinese Torture Chamber

Always Purée

Part 25: The Chinese Torture Chamber

Time sure flied like migrating swallows. Nearly a month had passed already since the foundation of the Inquisifabs and the movie _Rings _was shown daily. The library had grown more crowded than a bus at that hour where groups of loud muggle school children think it's a good idea to go on their class trips and it was almost just as insufferably noisy, too. Exam nerves spread like the plague as April was to morph into May by the weekend. Remus had spent two hours doing the homework of others in the library. Like always he had gone there after school. A lot of it was easy, especially the homework of those in years below who had yet to realize the importance of homework, but he prioritized the homework of his peers because of the coming finals. He would have deliberately done them poorly had it not been for his own exam nerves. His jaws were beginning to cramp from too much gumball chewing. He always stuck to self-chewing gum in class but it just wasn't the same thing because it was entirely different and took away the point completely but at least teachers didn't demand it was spit out in their hands.

"I need a break" he said, exhaustedly running his hand through his hair after the ninth report about frog kissing techniques. The he picked up _Vegan potions; they may not be as powerful, or fun and they probably won't work… _by Eddie Bell. It took him two seconds to read through it because it was compiled of a 100 identical pages that all read: _Vegan potions? What are you stupid? Go hug a tree! _

"How long until that scorching thing is ready?" Mac asked. She had been assigned to guard Remus as if he was a prisoner and make sure he didn't try to slip anybody ideas.

"Two weeks"

"He's done with biological warfare, that's for sure. No way will he be talked into using germs a third time"

"Maybe I should just give them all the flu…" Remus looked morosely through the window at the hares, all of which reminded him of Bluebell.

"How many know of that potion?" Mac asked.

"One, two, three, four, five, six…seven?"

"_How _have you let so many people know about it?"

"We kind of needed help with it"

"There's just a chance that people will want to stop you, have you thought of that?"

"I know not everybody thinks it's worth the risk"

Mac looked at her watch. She would have to get ready for her dentist appointment soon.

"Well as long as it's well protected" she said.

"It's… _extremely _well protected" Remus jotted down a reminder to himself of protecting the potion better. Mac began to pack her books and papers together.

"I hate going to the dentist" she said. "One of these days you will have to see one too"

Remus tried to blow a gum bubble so large it would pop all over his face just like in the cartoons he had seen, but the bubble didn't grow larger than a ping pong ball before it ruptured pathetically. "I've never needed a dentist and I never will"

"Then you must have miracle teeth. See you"

Perhaps it was the miracle teeth that had so far spared Remus from cavities but he still thought it was his miracle toothbrush. Mac nearly tripped over a house elf when she left, and then a beautiful but angry young witch in heels like sewing thread following it shoved her out of her way and both the elf and the witch disappeared far into the back.

The angry witch slammed her well manicured hands against the table. Reggie hit himself in the face with his postulant handbook and looked up nervously.

"Where is he?" Bella asked with poorly contained rage.

"Wh-who?"

"_Who?!"_ Bella took a moment to collect some descriptive adjectives. "That horrible, bratty, thieving, cruel…"

Reggie's interior simmered with bitter envy as Bella kept listing all the villainous qualities he had yet to possess.

"Your salacious _roach _of a brother! Where's Sirius?!"

"How should I know? Not here"

Bella put a hand to her hip. "And not in the Gryffindor tower either, it seems. I know that they love to prove how able they are to resist torture curses up there, but I did cause a number of them a great deal of agony and I believe them" A piece of the table broke off when Bella jerked out her nails. "That boy is dead. _Dead, _you hear?!"

"Do you think killing him will make you popular with the Dark Lord?"

"Oh" Bellas' lips curled into a tender smile and she patted Reggie on his cheek. "Nobody has to know _I _did it"

She pinched him and ruffled his hair affectionately before carrying on with her search.

Single drops of water squeezed through the holes of the broken shower. A Hufflepuff boy sat on a chair beneath the rusty mouth piece, squirming every time a bead of wetness fell on top of his scalp that was slowly beginning to become slightly moist.

"Confess! Confess!" urged an Inquisifab that went by the name Mort and who also happened to be a beater for the Griffins and who had been spared from being kicked from the team in spite of having too much muggle in him because he was a good beater. Nobody had actually been kicked from the team (they were all good, otherwise they wouldn't be on the team would they?) for having too much muggle in them but Sirius was so disinterested in Quidditch that he didn't know who was on the team anyway.

"Confess what?" asked the boy who had been brought to the bathroom with the broken pipes across the wall from the staff room for having too much muggle in him.

"Don't play dumb!" Mort hosed some _Aguamenti Maxima _in the face of the victim. "The Chinese torture-chamber's not enough for you, eh? Have at you!"

The boy looked like a water revenant when Mort stopped with the aquatic treatment to give him a chance to confess.

"Just confess whatever" said James, wanting to be done with this because Slytherin had booked the field again so it was important he was there before them.

"No, not whatever" said Sirius.

"Not whatever?"

"No, not whatever"

"If not whatever, then what?"

"It"

The Hufflepuff victim was made of surprisingly tough stuff. He had been tied to the chair for nearly an hour and still refused to confess 'it'. Sirius and James left the bathroom to talk privately.

"Just what is'it'?" James asked,

"You know!" Sirius thought that if he gestured wildly, that would explain it all clearly. "_It!"_

"No I don't know"

Sirius let his hands fall, unable to think of a way to explain it more clearly. He squinted suspiciously.

"How can you not know what _it _is?"

"Because no one has told me what _it _is! Do _you _know what _it _is?"

Sirius blew the forelocks out of his face with a scornful puff. "Of course _I _know what _it _is!"

James raised his brows, unconvinced. "I don't believe you"

The door to the Chinese torture chamber opened. Roy came out with a list.

"Drama club starts in a minute so I really ought to dash" he said. "So far we got: accidentally killed his neighbour's fish through neglect, once had a dirty dream involving his aunt, has a crush on you, is actually related to Hitler-"  
"Any of that 'it'?" James asked.

"No, no, _no!" _Sirius stuck a pair of fingers in his mouth and whistled. Cas appeared by his side with the latest prophet and a ginger ale instantly and gave him both items.

"Here for example" Sirius uncorked the bottle with his teeth and showed them a small heading on the front page. "'_Six people dead in freak fire station accident.' _Make him confess that!"

He returned the prophet to Cas and both she and Roy went back inside the bathroom to deliver the demand.

"I have to go" said James.

"Me too I'm bored anyway"

They followed the corridor past the staff room and headed down the stairs together.

"Has the persecution novelty worn off already?"

"I don't have to supervise them all the time"

This part of Hogwarts was often deserted because no classes were held here. It was a good place to eaves drop on people who thought nobody was eaves dropping. Sirius cast a quick look behind him, a little encumbered.

"Joining the Eaters seemed like a really good idea" he confessed. "But I just haven't had the time to figure out how to weasel out of the tattoo bit"

"Maybe you should put the persecutions on hold and prioritize the weaseling, then" said James.

"I know, I just… Bookish Hufflepuffs are surprisingly hard to come by!"

"Really?"

"Really. Sure they exist and they find things quickly, but… You know" Sirius sipped on his ginger ale.

"No I honestly don't know"

All the explaining of obvious things Sirius had to do really irritated him. "I tell them to look something up and they do, but then they have to look up another thing just to understand the first thing. They're just not…. What's the word…"

"Encyclopedic?"

"Exactly!"

"You don't want a good finder, you want a walking encyclopedia"

"That would be handy. There must be some of them around" Sirius stroked his chin. "Maybe if I get a Hufflepuff to find one _for_ me…"

"Go for it" said James. "I can only think of one that was brought up in an attic with only antique books for company and I'm sure that if you ask _really nicely…_Actually you probably won't have to ask nicely, you can probably be as rude as you want about it-_"_

"No" Sirius shook his head. "That is out!"

"Ok, ask nicely then"

"I'm _not _going to _that!"_ Sirius finished his ginger ale and it shattered when he threw it at a bin.

"Why not? _Oh…"_ James nodded, thinking that he finally understood. "Do you want me to ask _for _you, is that what you're trying to say?"

"_No-"_

"Well then I just don't know why you brought it up at all-"

"I only meant that I would really appreciate it if you would look a bit"

They reached the bottom of the stairs. Sirius sat down with a restless feeling of not having accomplished what he wanted to accomplish and James rested an arm on the railing.

"You know I'm not encyclopedic but sure I'll look without the assistance of anybody whatsoever" he said.

"… Good…"

"I just don't know what you're afraid of-"

"I'm not afraid of anything" Sirius wished some rats would crawl out of their holes in the walls so he could blow them up.

"If you really want to be the next Dark Lord" said James, "you'd be smart in taking advantage of peoples' assets, even those of your subordinates and slaves. What I wonder is, if it's personal"  
"It's _not _personal. Why would it be personal? Subordinates and slaves are still _people"_

James twirled his wand between his fingers thoughtfully. "If there was such a thing as an Encyclopedia Potato, would you not consult it?"

"If it was a special Encyclopedia Potato-"  
"So not if it was another potato that just happened to be encyclopedic?"

Irritation had been plaguing Sirius more and more the past weeks and the sheer idiocy of this discussion fired him to his feet.

"Potatoes aren't encyclopedic, don't be absurd! And what if they were? I wouldn't trust an encyclopedic potato if it had a history of lying and working against me!"

It didn't matter if the nature of those brain worms made Sirius impossible to reason with, James still wanted to see what would happen.

"You can always turn a potato into chips. No, I think I see what the problem is. You're not at all afraid that the potato will work against you-"

"No I'm not I'm simply stating that that is what it will do"  
"You don't want to rely on Potato because you're confused by Potato"

"What of it?"

"You want to avoid Potato because deep inside you like Potato and you really don't have the time to worry about what to do with Potato right now. And you can't ask somebody else to consult Potato for you because then you'd be admitting there is more to Potato than just being a Potato, and yet you're dropping me these hints about bookish finders, because you're afraid-"

"_No-"_

"-to just say it like it is. What you really want is for me to consult Potato for you without you knowing of it so you won't have to worry about whether or not everything you know about Potato is really true and become all confused by your deeply conflicting _feelings _for Potato, mwa mwa!"

Sirius turned away dramatically. "For Merlin's sake! Potatoes are potatoes, nothing more!"

"Yeah. And this potato just happens to like you for some inexplicable reason. Why would Potato want you to get a tattoo anyway?"

"Some… sneaky reason!"

"You're scheming to become the next Dark Lord and _Potato _is the sneaky one?"

The storm of confusion settled abruptly like a very brief cloudburst. Sirius cooled like an iron removed from a furnace and instantly dipped into ice water.

"All that crap about not hurting flies and vegan supplements is just an act, obviously" he said coolly. "It's not real. It's all pretend"

They followed the corridor to another staircase that brought them to a slightly livelier area.

"Are you afraid it's all pretend?" James asked.

"I _know _it's all pretend"

"Why didn't you say so sooner?"

"I thought that perhaps you had something between your ears, a bit of fluff at least, but I was clearly wrong to think you could realize obvious things for yourself"

This talk had delayed James more than he had expected and he hoped that Steve or Rol had made it in time to claim the pitch before the Slytherins because it was so difficult to get rid of teams that were already up and flying.

"In any case I'll see what I can do. But it will take longer than you're used to seeing as I have a life outside the library"

"Thank you. Didn't you have quidditch or something?"

"Clearly avoiding confusion is more important to you than avoiding that tattoo. Interesting how we prioritize sometimes. You're more afraid of being wrong and let down than being permanently connected to Voldemort. Mac is right. Deep down we're all really a bunch of cowards"  
"I'll find a way with or without you"  
"Yeah you use that fear to prove me wrong and reach your goal!"

Sirius was getting quite fed up with the baseless accusations and being called the c-word. His buttons had been successfully pushed uninterruptedly for too many minutes and confusion had been running so high and agitated him so much that he without even thinking much about it whipped out his wand, prepared to retort with something mildly unforgivable if his nerves were threaded on one more time.

"This feels like such a breakthrough for me" said James because Sirius's buttons weren't easily pushed and even if they were he never showed it.

"You certainly have reached a new level of annoying today" said Sirius.

"Then you should turn me into a cake or something"

"And serve you in pieces? Maybe I will"

"Do it then. You wouldn't back away from a fight, would you?"

"I _never _back away from a fight!"

_THERE YOU ARE!_

"Later!"

Sirius dashed quicker than a rat out of an aqueduct, hopping over banana peels that were aimed in his path. Running after him Bella regretted her choice of boots. The heels were fabulously thin but it wasn't practical when you ran on surfaces covered in banana peels, but she knew that Sirius shared her affinity for fabulously unsteady footwear. Sirius slid down a series of spiraling railings, trying to decide which secret door was closest, when he saw the window with the rubber fig by the painting of Pomona and Theodora, the twin daughters of Helga Hufflepuff and legendary founders of Hogsmead, sitting by a round table in beautiful renaissance dresses and pirate boots, each with a badger on their lap and dividing treasure between them. Sirius stopped by the fig, trying to recall the password but it eluded him. He could hear Bella's clattering steps nearing fast.

"What's the password? Quickly!" He asked the sisters.

"Sorry" said Pomona. "For only he who is a true Hufflepuff-"

"Or she" said Theodora.

"-may know the password when in dire need of hiding, and there is no way any descendant of Salazar will ever figure it out-"

"Hufflepuff rules"

"Oh, blasted" The window shattered and the shards rained down on the floor when Pomona snapped her fingers. The window repaired instantly when Sirius had climbed over the sill into the dark passageway leading to the library among other locations. He crashed into Potato instantly and a firework of books and papers got knocked out of his hands.

"Potato!" said Sirius, not having expected to run into Potato.

Remus dismissed the name calling as another jab at his vegetarianism and picked up the items he had dropped. It was better than Carrot, that only worked on gingers and his hair was closer to potato in terms of colour. And Cabbage had just been silly. Broccoli he had kind of liked, so that hadn't lasted very long.

"Good day" he said, intending to carry on through the exit when Sirius blocked his way.

"You can't leave" said Sirius.

"Why not?"

"Because you don't have my permission!"

It didn't matter that Sirius was crazy; it was still weird for him to just hang out by the exit for seemingly no reason.

"Are you running from someone?" Remus asked.

"_No!"_

There was no window to look through inside the passageway so Sirius stuck his see-ear to the wall and looked through it.

"Aren't you supposed to be doing other people's homework?" he asked. "And isn't Mac supposed to guard you and make sure you don't go off doing things unsupervised?"

"She had a dentist appointment"

Sirius turned away from the ear, in the mood of telling Remus to go back to Russia, but it was hard because he always looked so deceitfully innocent with his effeminate, whiskey-coloured eyes that would have made him such a suitable drag-artist. But Sirius knew it was all pretend and he was going to tell everybody of how pretend it was.

"I think I'll go back. If I have your permission" said Remus.

"Go"

It was disheartening that Sirius grew bitchier by the day, but at least he wasn't wearing that bracelet. Turning back, Remus saw after only a couple of steps a hole in the wall with a nest of Diamond Fanged Weaver Bats. It was like finding a rare mushroom after having searched for years without success. Remus searched his bag for a container large enough to fit a pair. The Tupperware container with the Little Mouse Traps was probably enough, and he had intended to release them anyway. He got down on his knees opening the lid and poured them all out on the stone floor. It was amazing what creatures you could find at Hogwarts and most of the time nobody knew how they had gotten there. Remus was responsible for some of them finding new homes where they weren't really welcome directly or indirectly, either because they escaped or because they were used as gag items without his permission.

Sirius looked through the see-ear again and saw that Bella was still out there pacing, convinced that he was somewhere near. He sat down on the floor to wait and watched Remus stuff yet another container with yet another gross pest that most likely was only good for taking up dorm space. It didn't matter that he always released everything again sooner or later if he didn't sell it to a potions supplies shop because he always brought more than he freed.

"Did you find a kind of lady bug that likes crawl into your ears and sing the Queen of the Night aria until you're slowly driven to suicide?" he asked.

"There's an earwig that does that" said Remus, getting back up on his feet. "Not the Queen of the Night aria. Largo Al Factotum from the Barber of Seville"

"Mozart. Whatever"

"Rossini"

Sirius whipped out his wand. _"Largo al factotum!" _ A red carpet rolled out before him. He got up and followed it to the hole in the wall. "So did you find an earwig, then?"

"I just released some Little Mouse Traps"

"Why would you? They are property damaging pests that people pay good money to be rid of. They are useless"  
"Just because they aren't of any use to you doesn't mean they aren't of any use to the eco system. Studies show they actually cleanse the air of dark energies. Organic White Arts_"_

"You could make up all kinds of crap and I would believe it"

"I know"

The damp passageways were full of all kinds of creatures that didn't do particularly epic stuff such as shifting into transvestites or biting, creatures that very few would miss if they were gone. The Weaver Bat was one such creature. They were Mineralvores like the Silver Sprites but preferred diamonds and coal. They weaved nets everywhere they could and they attacked by weaving their victims inside cocoons of their extremely sticky web. When Sirius looked inside the hole he knew that it was the same bat he had once found in a neighbour's house less than ten years ago and without knowing what they were called put in his mum's jewelry box. She had walked around with a bag over her head for a week because of the bat that was stuck to her face and she had missed a very snooty party.

When Sirius looked inside the fist-sized hole in the wall he saw a lot of shiny items, among which one shiny item stood out in particular.

"Is that my ring?" he asked, sticking his hand inside the hole, forgetting about how sticky the web of the Weaver Bat was. The bats trapped his hand and tried to drag it deeper inside the wall and Sirius struggled to get unstuck. Remus thought that there was no hurry to tell him how to get unstuck and went to look through the see-ear to see whom he had been running from.

"Those are some _very _thin heels" he said.

"I'd try stroking it but I can't fit a second hand inside" said Sirius, thinking to himself that there was a sentence he'd never thought he'd say and wondered if it had sounded dirty.

"All those banana peels are going to make the hall smell like compost heap" said Remus, ignoring him. "Couldn't you have gone with Ice Rink or Marbles?"

"That wasn't me now how do you get unstuck? Way to be a sneaky potato and set me up with some obscure winged spider-gerbil hybrid, I knew you couldn't be trusted-"

"Obscure? They were covered in class this morning"

"You would take advantage of my weaknesses. You _know _I don't go to class _in the morning_!"

"Or at noon or siesta hour or whenever it's five o'clock somewhere!"

"I suggest you stop being smart unless you want to serve another Dark Lord. Mac isn't too bad at taking notes either"  
Remus turned his attention back to the witch in the thin heels and murderous look in her eyes.

"No but she's a spiller"

"So are you, you just attach gum under your cups" said Sirius.

"Exactly so I'm not"

Then a thought occurred to Sirius that maybe these bats were like quicksand and his entire arm would end up torn off if he kept resisting them and he stopped struggling. Remus saw that the angry witch was looking at the window as if she was beginning to suspect it could be a hidden entrance.

"So her out there" he said, "with the crazy heels, threatening to send you to Hades where you will be put through all kinds of horrors, is it somebody important to you?"

Sirius thought that was a very odd choice of word. "Important? Why would you ask if she's important?"

"Well, for a start, she has your" Eyes. "She looks like you kind of a little. So I thought, blood ties of some sort. Why else wouldn't you have jinxed her unconscious by now?"

"Because she's a girl. Can't jinx girls"

"Hiding from some banana peels is just not like you"

"I can't really duel well in these shoes. Juggling dueling and keeping balance, not as easy as it looks"

"Do you have a cwush on her?"

"A cwush on my own cousin what are you sick?!"

"It's not uncommon and it's legal"

"Oh, I know. Why do you want to talk cwushes all of a sudden? Normally you avoid the subject like the plague. 'Class started', 'I have homework', 'My aunt haunts a house boat'. Could it be that you're the one with the cwush?"

"Just thought I'd ask"

"Is it Janine? Is it Mac?" Gasp. "Is it Cas? It's ok if it is. We've never been that serious. You know I'm not possessive"

Bored with watching the witch outside threaten the twins, Remus went back to the whole in the wall and stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. The bats let go of Sirius, whose arm was now very sticky and gross but free. Remus poured the little coal he had with him into the empty Tupperware container and scrambled with it outside the hole.

"Oh I see" said Sirius after Remus's sudden loss of interest in the subject "Whenever you're ready. Unlike you I'm not an advocate of secrets and inhibitions"

"Good for you" Remus placed a piece of coal by the opening so the bats would pick up the scent better.

Sirius searched Remus's bag for a dagger to scrape his arm with.

"I didn't just have a crush on her. I was in love with her" he confessed.

"Wow"

"I know. But she was so malicious and so cruel" Sirius sighed nostalgically. "She was my role model. She was like the older sister I always wanted… To torment. But then I pulled a Carrie on her and her pure, vegan fiancé broke off their engagement. This was before the movie and the book, mind you. Anyway, at the time I just thought it was funny. It wasn't until much later I realized just why it was so upsetting. Because it was muggle blood"

The bats just snagged the pieces of coal using their sticky web like frog tongues. Remus was running out of coal. "Do you regret putting a militant purist through that?"

"I regret putting her gown through that" Sirius had to scorch the web off the knife after each scraping because it was so sticky. He began to see the skin underneath again slowly but surely.

"Say" he said as if he was rehearsing lines for a play poorly. "Speaking of regretting things. You know that tattoo Cas got this summer? She regrets it now"  
"Oh really?"

"She says her mole makes her Daisy Duck look too squint eyed"

"That can happen" The bats hopped into the Tupperware container, sniffing the coal curiously. Remus pressed the lid over them. The bats were just small enough to not get flattened but it was still pretty crowded for them in there, but it was just a temporary solution and the lid had breathing holes and the dorm wasn't far away.

"Good thing you can remove them with laser" said Sirius.

"Yeah"

Sirius still had a little web left to scrape and he took his time. Remus waited patiently, more patiently than the bats. Of course he could have it back later but Sirius seemed to have something on his mind, judging by his deliberately slow scraping.

"I wonder if laser works on _all _tattoos…" Sirius asked, trying to sound casual.

"Not on very, very dark ones. Although if it did, removing one would still get you in heaps of trouble"

Sirius gave the dagger one final scorching before returning it, so obviously bothered.

"Would you like me to let you know if I find a way?" Remus asked.

"No I want you to get back in your cage, you potato!" Sirius pushed Remus out of his way and when he saw that the coast was finally clear he uttered the password.

Trying to look at her swank in the full length fairest-of-them-all-mirror made Cas's neck cramp a little. A toothbrush rattled into a cup in the bathroom and a running faucet came to an abrupt stop. Mac came into the dorm, drying her mouth with a towel and throwing it on her bed.

"No, Cas" she said and sat down to go through her purse. "She does not look squint eyed"  
"Do you mean that?" Although Mac had told her that Daisy Duck did not look squint eyed over ten times now she still thought the mole was too close to the outline. She stopped pressing down the waistline of her skirt. "It's too pink anyway. Pink is just not evil"

"I thought one of the wonderful things about the Inquisifabs was that you could wear any colour you want. Roy even dyed his school robes fuchsia"

Cas walked up to the assortment of black tops on her bed. "I know but let's face it; black is just a sexier colour. If I had known I was going to join a hate group I would have tattooed a monochromic Scrooge McDuck"

Cas picked up the black, velvet top with the clam embroideries and found to her great annoyance that the back of it was covered in cat hair. Her Kirk and Spock in the Star Trek Enterprise kitchen fanfiction was also clinging statically to the garment. She removed it and placed it on top of her dream journal.

"Yeah well once they've sorted out the ordeal with the earworms you will be happy you went with Daisy" said Mac.

"That's talking like a traitor, Mac" said Cas. "Don't tell me you believe in earworms. Do you believe in nargles as well?" Cas tossed her head back and cackled shrilly at the thought. "Nargles! Hoo!" She wiped tears from her eyes and summoned her lint remover.

"There were earworms at the camp" said Mac. "I've seen proof. Maybe Remus can show them to you too"

Cas sat down on her bed and started brushing off her top. "Just because he found something slimy somewhere and keeps it in a jar does it mean it really _is _earworms. He could be making things up and it's really something useless that does nothing, like nargles. Nobody has actually found any earworms _inside anybody's brain_"

"How can you say that when _you don't even have them"_

"Maybe the purists just got it right, Mac"  
Mac sighed and crumpled an old receipt and tossed it at Lily, who had been sitting quietly on her bed, grinning vacantly like a psychopath stalker.

"A little help?"

Lily turned her head very slowly. "What?"

"Explaining to Cas about earworms and how they operate?"

"She _does _have a point" Not only the way Lily turned her head was creepy, but also the creepy, lobotomized tone she spoke in. "There is no evidence that there is a link between the clock slugs from that camp and this purist thing. He could have bottled a couple of ants and called it brain ants"

"But there's no such thing as brain ants. I don't think"

"I'm sure that if he told you there were you'd believe him"

"I'd look it up first, of course"

"In any case, I have a feeling you will be convinced soon enough. Perhaps it is just as well they make that scorching potion, so doubters like you will shut up when it doesn't work. I just hope the damage won't be too big"  
"Fantastic" Mac zipped her purse. "You have worms too"

"Maybe you should offer they try on you first!" Cas suggested and Lily beamed at the idea. Grabbing her purse and coat, Mac promised to bring both of them stickers.


	26. The First Test

Always Purée

Part 26: The First Test

The finished potion sat on the writing desk in the dormitory next to the Holy Grail after four weeks of guessing what the vague instructions meant, interpreting typos and verbal abuse. It looked a lot like lard. Remus uncorked a glass bottle and stuck a funnel in it before pouring through it as much of the potion that would fit. Sirius was away for the evening doing some unspecified Death Eater thing so the potion could unfortunately not be applied immediately.

"Unless we storm in there and kidnap him" said James. "I'm not busy"

"Yeah that won't just get us killed"

"Right, well, let's go then"

"You run to your death if you feel like. I think I'll just look up ways to remove dark tattoos in the meantime"

"You could have just said no"  
They ascended the stairs, crossed the common room and passed through the hefty soprano with the Viking helmet, outside of which they ran into one Cheshire-y ginger intent on slowing them down.

"That must be the scorching potion" she said.

"Yup" said James.

"That can render you as good as brain dead. Isn't Black, like, the love of your lives? Do you really want to put him through that when it's obvious he doesn't have earworms?"

"You would say that because you've got worms"

"If I've got worms then you must scorch my brain also. So go on then. I've already shaved" Lily turned her head so they could see the shaved patch on the side of her head. It hadn't even occurred to them that they could scorch somebody else's brain first. James turned to Remus.

"Who else was at that camp?"

"Roy was at the camp"  
"If you really believe in Purism then you should test it on me first" Lily insisted.

"I'm not going to waste this on a stupid muggle!" James shoved her out of his way but not too abrasively.

"Then, can I be your slave?" she asked. The worms had made her so docile and obliging and it hadn't been that difficult for James to lure out of her the answers he had needed when he had minded the potion alone because Remus wanted to save the Cosmospacists from certain death. Lily was more submissive than Cas (but Cas didn't actually have worms, she liked to submit) and it was a little disturbing how easy it was to boss her around, but just a little.

"Sure. You can start by making me a sandwich" said James.

Lily wasted no time and ran off set to work instantly.

"Déjà vu…" said James. "Have I dreamt this?"

"Maybe you had a prophetic dream" said Remus. "Try to remember if the sandwich was poisoned"

"These worm people are crazy, but they're honest"

"And obsessed"

"Fine. Next time I'll go with: Knit me a jumper"

They continued down the hall and down the central stairs.

"Oh good" said Remus. "Here I thought you didn't want to scorch her brain first out of some sort of concern"

"'Concern' and 'having a bit of fun' don't have to be mutually exclusive"

"But when that jumper knitted out of Boa Wool squeezes your guts out, you won't feel that way"

They reached the bottom of the stairs and continued straight ahead, reaching more stairs and the bottom of more steps.

"You're just jealous you can't have a slave. Your best case scenario is that you get to be a fat chick's slave" said James.

"Or I could just go to Russia"

"Would you rather go to Russia than be a fat chick's slave?"

"Let's just look for Roy now, shall we?"

And Roy was most likely in the Ravenclaw tower and the fastest way there from their current point was through notice board by the marble bust of Captain Goldhook Smith, former headmaster, amateur pirate and founder of Gringotts.


	27. Tooth Ache

Always Purée

Part 27: Tooth Ache

No brewing was allowed in potions class the next day. The class was strictly theoretical and they were going to remain that way for the rest of May. The cabinets with ingredients were locked and well protected because the professors did no longer believe that the students were mature and responsible enough to brew unsupervised without putting each other into comas. And because there was nothing to do at potions except reading, they were free to read and write their reports wherever they wanted.

"I can't find any method that doesn't involve cutting a body part off" said James, shoving a fat book away from him. He and Remus were in the library looking for ways to remove dark tattoos. "But he did once say he wished he had a hook for a hand"

Finding a way to remove a dark tattoo had overnight become a bigger priority than scorching Sirius's brain. Remus flicked a page in a book about skin modification and rubbed his right cheek like he had done all day.

"Here's a way that doesn't require cutting a body part off. But you need a very sharp and very dark object with an extremely fine point, wherever you find that _ow" _He had woken up with a massive tooth ache after having been fine the day before and chewing gum was for the first time in his life to his great distress an agonizing experience.

"Some really dark knife, then? Are you ok? You look like you need a dentist"

"It's probably just a sensitive nerve or something"

"Have you _ever _been to a dentist?"

"I don't need a dentist. I brush three times a day. I just don't understand where this came from…" Remus reached into a bag of M&M's and stuffed his mouth with a generous handful of colourful chocolate beads but instead of alleviating his sullen spirit they just caused him more pain. He sighed sadly. An idea unrelated to quidditch popped up in James's mind like a potential buyer at a showing, or a party guest ringing the wrong door bell.

"You really should let somebody take a look" he said.

"I'm fine"

"Maybe you're fine now but people have _died _from infected teeth"

"No one has ever died from infected teeth"

"I'm sure someone has at some point!"

"Stop worrying about my teeth and try to think of where you can find dark, sharp objects"

_That's what I'm doing, you..!, _James thought. He couldn't say what he was thinking, because Remus could be so touchy when it came to his fluffy condition and had all kinds of negative preconceptions, and to make matters worse, this week was _that _week. If only they had timed everything better, but there was no point crying over that now. "Well I would, but it's really hard to concentrate over your sighs and moans of agony, and maybe you would concentrate better too if you weren't in pain"

"It will pass don't worry about it"

Sirius had overslept. He had spent all night giving Voldemort dating advice and received a tattoo in return for his subliminal services so he had returned some time before sunrise. It was already past lunchtime when he newly awakened came to the library to look for ways to remove this unwanted violation of his skin on his own, but saw right away that the book he would have looked in had it been available was currently unavailable.

"Good morning" he yawned.

"That's good day to you and guess what? There is a way to remove dark tattoos as it turns out" said James.

"Oh really? What's that?"

"I don't know but you need a sharp, dark object if you can think of any"

Sirius's glance fell upon Remus's dismally page-flicking being instantly and he sat down next to him and slid up close.

"Hello have you lost weight?"

"Did you just call me fat?"

"No, I just thought you looked exceptionally stick like this fine morning or day. All those M&M's, I don't know where you put them"

"Why are you acting so pally-wally all of a sudden when you've spent the past two weeks trying to lure me inside a cage"

"What? That's your imagination running wild again. It was a joke. You know? One of those things that aren't ok if somebody else does it, but it's ok if I do it, you know?"

"Not really" Remus tried to have just one M&M and regretted it dearly. At least he had his self-chewing gum, but it wasn't the same, in fact it missed the point completely.

"You look like you need a dentist!" said Sirius excitedly.

"It'll pass, it's just a sensitive nerve"

"A nerve doctor, then! Come on, you don't have to be afraid of Pomfrey!"

Remus began to pack his things, saying he had things to drop off at the dorm.

Watching him prepare to leave, Sirius felt desperate to act fast. He pointed his wand at the curtains and slashed them thoroughly, just in time for Pince to pass by with her squeaky cart. She stopped and gaped.

"What happened to the curtains?" she asked, shocked.

"It was Remus" said Sirius, feigning regret, and Remus couldn't have glowered at him with more glower. "You know" Sirius continued boldly in spite of the glowering. "Sometimes he _just _can't help it. It's no one's' fault"

Pince looked at Remus sternly. "You better go to Madam Pomfrey right away"

"It wasn't me!" Remus told her but Pince refused to listen. Most of the staff would have sided with him over Sirius but Pince wasn't one of them because he kept leaving his M&M's all over the place, he stuck gum under his cups that later got stuck to surfaces and when he tried to lift the cups he ended up spilling anyway and he took books from the reservation cart and didn't ever return anything on time. In general he treated the library like he owned the place.

Sirius shook his head. "You really believe that, don't you?"

"It has happened before" said Pince. "Madam Pomfrey insists you're sent to the Hospital Wing every time you act weird"  
"I just hope you're not skipping your meds again"

"If I was, you'd be dead" said Remus, calmly envisioning himself tearing Sirius's head off.

"Let's just go, I think I'm coming down with the flu anyway" said James before more things were shredded in the library. He really wasn't looking forward to planting Sirius's DNA on a serrated knife and making it look like an accident.

At the hospital wing Sirius explained to Pomfrey that he was the one that had slashed the curtains and that Remus was in fact innocent, but he deliberately tried to not sound convincing. But it didn't matter that she believed it when James confirmed that it was in fact true, because Pomfrey thought that since Remus was there anyway, a quick checking of levels couldn't hurt and he did look a little as if he was boiling on the inside with murder lust. It didn't matter if Sirius completely deserved to have his head torn off sometimes, fact was that Remus would get all the blame for it and most people who knew the truth didn't think that was fair, at least not when he was boiling with murder lust for Sirius.

"You're UTK-levels are a bit elevated" said Pomfrey, running her beeping diagnosing wand over Remus as if she was looking for a barcode. "Are you sure you haven't had any killing fantasies today?"

Remus glanced at Sirius who was fiddling with Pomfrey's equipment and those whiskey eyes flashed in limoncello. Sirius knocked over a cup of spatulas.

"Since you're here anyway, maybe you could get those sensitive nerves checked" he said, coolly collecting the spatulas together. If an audience had been watching it would have said: _Ooooh!_

"I think your canines just grew a quarter inch…" said Pomfrey, concerned and went to fetch a ruler to measure with, along with some tranquilizers in case of emergency. James put down a bottle of cough syrup he had failed to uncork and picked up a serrated knife that gave it to Sirius.

"Here hold this"

"Don't pretend you didn't think it was funny" said Sirius, taking the knife and running a finger over the blade.

"You should probably go back to sucking up now if you like being whole"

"Or, I could just stro-" Sirius's mouth zipped together.

"Strangle yourself? You might as well"

Pomfrey put down the ruler on an equipment tray on a cart and made a note of the measurements. "I see you have a little tooth decay" she said.

"Does it need removing?" James asked.

"Removing? No, no, no. Just gargle this" Pomfrey filled a small cup with some CavFix and gave it to Remus and disappeared briefly into her office to find his medicine list.

"I've heard that some meds only remove the symptoms, but not the cause…" said James. Remus downed the CavFix. Then he hopped off the bunk and left to loudly search through drawers of rattling steel tools until he found a pair of forceps, which he used to pull out his now healed cuspid. It was extremely painful to watch. Then he threw the tooth angrily on the tray.

"That's what you wanted, wasn't it? You could have just asked"

"Yeah, we thought you'd say no and that it wouldn't work…"

"Good thing you didn't, then. This way you got what you wanted"

The cart knocked over an IV-stand when Remus pushed it out of the way on his way out. Ringing silence filled the room after all the rattling and clanging. James picked up the tooth.

"This better work"

Sirius unzipped his mouth. "I feel weird. What is that feeling?"

"Could it be guilt?"

"I don't know. What's that like?"

James picked up the bottle of cough medicine before leaving. He wasn't really coming down with a flu but hey, cough medicine.

"I don't think it was entirely wrong" he reasoned. "We needed something quick and we _did _get what we wanted"

They passed through the ward of patient beds on their way out, most of which were empty, which made those occupied all the more eye catching. Sirius stopped by Roy's bed, where he lied looking peaceful as if he was sleeping, the top of his head wrapped in bandage like a 20's flapper hat for a mummy and his mouth slightly aghast just to show off those sparkly teeth.

"What happened here?" Sirius asked.

"Bad memory charm probably" said James. "Those things can fire back at you"  
A journal on a clipboard sat attached to the foot of the bed. Sirius picked it up.

"It says here: cause of coma: unidentified potion. And somebody tried to crack his skull open"

"Weird" said James, looking around the ward until he saw on an unoccupied and neatly made bed a book that seemed to have been forgotten there. He went to stab it with the tooth. The book became a little fuzzy but the growling sounded more like purring.


	28. Always Purée

Always Purée

Part 28: Always Purée

The record player crackled. It sat on the floor, spinning the final turns of Bach's _Minuet in G minor. _Snape put down _Carrie _and swapped the record for some Boccherini, the fourth of seven minuets he needed to play for his beauty potion. It had never occurred to him all the time he had encountered the word 'minuet' in recipes that it _wasn't _a typo. Maybe that was why they had never worked. It wasn't rare for recipes to involve background music, especially if the potion contained audio sensitive organisms. After having swapped the records Snape grabbed a couple of gummy bears from a small bag and stuck them in his mouth and picked up _Carrie _again which he was reading for himself and not for the potion.

Snape shared Lab A with nobody except for the bats and the rats this afternoon, and he was greatly enjoying the peaceful solitude when all of a sudden the doors flew up, loudly slamming against the wall and then loudly slamming shut. Choking on his gummy bears, Snape looked up from his book and saw that it was Remus and he was so sour looking and seemed so occupied by his own angry thoughts that he didn't have the decency to look where he unpacked his things and just emptied all the crap he kept in his tattered old bag right next to Snape. Then he rummaged noisily through the cupboards beneath the bench for a cauldron in the right size and emptied a bottle into it. Then he proceeded to slam books against the table and all this loudness made it extremely difficult for Snape to call him stupid and useless at potions and tell him to bugger off and express any general taunting. When the rattling and slamming ended at last, he had forgotten what he was going to say (it had started with: 'you're mum is so stupid', but he couldn't remember the clever bit that had followed) and he was really concerned about how all the noise would affect the quality of his audio sensitive potion.

"Are you _done?!" _Snape asked. It was obvious from Remus's' hasty turn of head that he really hadn't seen where he had unpacked his things and had honestly thought that nobody had seen him furiously slamming and rummaging. He began to pack his things together again a little less loudly but still loudly, knocking things to the floor and getting more irritated because of that and Snape saw to his great consternation that his own potion was beginning to turn black from the shameless wreaking of havoc.

"Will you _cut that out?! _You're scaring the ingredients!" Snape rescued a particularly large book from a pre-bagging desk slam and put it down quietly. "You're acting like it's _that time of the month!"  
_"That's a new one. You Slytherins really are _too clever!"_

"I can't be too clever or you won't get it"

Remus took the rescued book and placed it over the cauldron, stacked a couple of more books on top and lifted it all carefully by the ears. Snape stared, appalled that somebody would so carelessly reduce the oxygen inflow.

"Now look" he said and lifted the stack of books off the potion. "My potion there is really sensitive to draft, movement and anything sudden. Now you couldn't boil a decent cup of tea on your own and I don't want to have you running back and forth all: 'What does this mean?', 'What does that mean?', 'What is this symbol with the upside down 'V' with the line across the middle?'"

"I think I can manage. Don't worry about it" said Remus, trying to bag the books but he had packed everything so sloppily he would have to repack it all for everything to fit inside.

"Oh really?"

"Yeah really"

"Then how come Sparkles is in a coma?"

"I don't know. Because I was gullible enough to think that you were genuinely interested in helping? I thought you had some kind of potions ethics"

"Don't try to put the blame on me! If you had done everything like I told you to he would have been fine! Your own incompetence is to blame!"

"So you weren't hoping that we'd put Sirius in a coma for you?"

"If I wanted you to put him in a coma for me I'd ask you to make him some tea. Why would I rob myself of seeing him ruin his own life?"

Remus looked down at the scorching potion, stumped. It was fortunate they had made a quadruple batch. "Well then I just don't know. It's been in the dormitory. Some kind of airborne contaminant?"

"A" said Snape.

"Sorry?"

"The letter 'A'. The upside down 'V' with the line across the middle. It's called: the letter 'A'. It's the first letter in the alphabet"

Remus picked up _Diagnosing Potions _and looked through it. He didn't care how boring Snape found _Carrie_, he was not arguing more today.

"'B' is the second letter" Snape went on.

"Oh really? Go on"

"Followed by C, D and E"

"Very good"

Then Remus started looking around the room, seemingly searching for something. Snape pointed with his wand behind his back discretely at the record player, first silencing it and then sending it around a shelf. It worked. Remus picked up _Diagnosing Potions _again and Snape knew it wouldn't help him.

"Cocoff Butt" he said.

"_What?"_ Name calling had never been beneath Snape but that was low even for him, Remus thought.

"The seven analysis points, or SAP if you will. Did you get them right on the exam? Every six year old knows them"  
"Uhm-"  
"Wrong"

"Colour" Remus counted on his fingers, looking down at his potion. "Bubbles… fumes… thickness-"

"NER!"

"Consistency. Fragrance… Did I say thickness?"

"_Ugh!"_

"No it was wrong, wasn't it?"

"I don't have all night. 10! 9! 8!"

"Fragrance… texture…

"3! 2! 1! Oh, _so _close! You're almost as smart as a six year old. I've underestimated you"

Remus picked up the book again. "That exam was five years ago…" he muttered.

"If you don't always keep Cocoff Butt in mind when you brew then it is no wonder you're so terrible at it"

"Temperature"

"Too late" It was Snapes turn to count on his fingers. "Colour, consistency, fumes, fragrance, bubbles, texture and temperature. Cocoff Butt"

"You need Cocoff Butt to help you remember those seven points?"

"No, I need Cocoff Butt to help explain them to idiots like you"

Flicking a page, Remus had to admit he'd never forget those points again.

"If you keep track of the Cocoff Butt points in all brewing phases you won't have to spend so much time searching in books when something isn't as it should be" said Snape. "And it greatly reduces the risk of putting anybody in a coma. This is _so _basic! But I guess you've been too busy babysitting Pratt and Twat to do things properly" Snape fetched from a shelf a reference guide for analyzing potions and opened it up. "Here's the Scorching Potion. Please tell me you know what phase it's in"

"The last phase, because it's finished. Fourth"

"The finished stage. So this is what you should be looking at" Snape pointed in the book and then shoved it to Remus. "A five year old could analyze a potion using this so maybe there's hope even for you"

Snape picked up where he had left off in _Carrie _whilst stirring hexagrams in his potion simultaneously. Remus looked at the Cocoff Butt points of the Scorching Potion in the reference guide and compared it to the finished product. The colour was right. The consistency he would have to check with his wand. He was just about to stick his 11 inch Willow in the potion when Snape took it from him and put it down.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"Checking consistency?"

"You're the one who brought up airborne contaminants. _Contaminants" _

Remus picked up his wand. "I clean it regularly"

"What is the one material that can't contaminate a potion?"

"I don't know. Is that another thing a five year old would know?"

"A contaminant would know"  
"A contaminant would know about contamination"

"That's why I'm confident you'll figure it out, so wipe that stupid grin from your face and think!"

Remus strummed the handles of the cauldron. "Pewter?"

"Was that's so hard? It's what these" Snape ran his Mountain Ash, 10,7 inches, Thestral hoof over the pewter rods that hung over the work tables in neat rows, sorted after size, "are for"

The pewter rods resembled knitting needles. Snape plucked down a size 4 ½ and gave it to Remus and continued with _Carrie,_ wondering how his inability to play any minuets at the moment would affect his potion. Now he had lost track of how long he had been stirring in both minuets and minutes.

Remus dipped the pewter rod in the potion and checked again with the reference guide, and thought that yes, he would describe it as medium thick and smooth. Thick enough for traces to form on the surface when you stirred and thin enough for them to fade away quickly like in a lose cake batter.

Next he took a whiff of the fragrance and recoiled. It was not remotely sweet and aromatic with a spicy undertone, but rather it smelled like what could probably be described as Cocoff Butt. The fumes looked ok but the bubbles were small and brittle instead of large and thick. The texture and the temperature seemed ok.

So the bubbles were wrong and it smelled bad. That didn't tell him anything, nor did the reference guide. But he realized to his great relief that _Diagnosing Potions _could.

_Tiny and sparse bubbles, _it read, _can be an indicator of any number of things. The temperature might be too low. _But the temperature was fine, he had checked. _The potion has been cooked for too long. If it also smells bad it could be suggestive that something crawled there and died, or something dead has been dropped into it either by ignorance, accident or sabotage. The most common way to sabotage a potion is to drop dead fish into it. Incidentally, the expression '_something fishy' _comes from…_

"Have you figured out that somebody has dropped dead fish in it yet?" Snape asked, shoving a strainer under Remus' nose.

It was sometime before dinner when Sirius' sanity took a dramatic dive further down the 'in'. He had fluctuated a lot between madness and seeming normal the past month, and being temperamental and capricious was normal for him so half the time it was impossible to tell if he really was normal those moments when he seemed normal.

It had all began with him complaining about a head ache and wanted to go outside for fresh air and floo powder and talk guillotines. They had made it down to the entrance hall when two witches passed them, one asking the other about that song she had stuck in her brain but couldn't figure out the title of and she had tried to sing what she remembered (and all she remembered was: '_da da da daaa')_ to her friend as they disappeared up the stairs.

"_Da da da daaa. _That's _You're mother should know"_ said James.

And it was at that point that Sirius had cracked completely and broke down in a puddle of tears on the floor, mistaking Hogwarts for home, himself for a nine year old and James for his father and asked him to tell him where his cats where.

"Orbit and Satellite never hurt anybody!" he cried.

James was absolutely stumped and had absolutely no clue of what to do. Suddenly that quirkily dysfunctional childhood didn't seem so quirky.

"Let's go somewhere?"

"No!"  
Steps echoed from the stairs to the dungeons. When Remus saw them he didn't look like he had any more clues.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"You have the book" said James.

Searching the currently extremely messy bag was not made easier when Sirius decided hug Remus tightly around the waist.

"Where's Orbit and Satellite?" he sniffed.

"Erm… They're at the vet. They're at a nice farm somewhere. They're at a showing" The last alternative calmed the hysterical reactions thankfully. Remus found _Manipulating Minds _and passed it to James.   
"Are you supposed to play along?" James whispered.

"_I don't know! _This must be the hysterical delusions phase that always precedes…" He didn't want to say it but it was all in the book. While James read for himself Sirius began to blubber apologies.

"I'm sorry, mother, I'm sorry for everything!"

"Like what?" Remus patted him on the shoulders and was delivered a very lengthy list of things Sirius was sorry for; he was sorry for being a disappointment, a no good, not cruel enough and generally defective. He wasn't just sorry about things he was or wasn't, but also for things he had done such as putting weaver bats in jewelry boxes, stealing make-up and changing the inscription on her antique brooch to _Always Purée _one night when she was hosting an important dinner party. It was obvious that he had lost his marbles completely and that there was no time to test the potion on anybody else first.


	29. Atria Bonnuit

Always Purée

Part 29: Atria Bonnuit

With instant-poly there was no place that couldn't be broken into, but sometimes it was enough to just dress in the clothes and act busy. Steel surfaces glistened in the brightly lit up turquoise operation room at St Mungos, where there was no piece of equipment unavailable to the amateur healers. Sirius lied on a bunk, looking peacefully asleep after having been hit in the back of the head with an IV stand. James finished reading through the instructions a third time.

"Why did you have to say it would be difficult?"

"It's ok I believe in you" said Remus.

"Or maybe _I _believe in _you!" _

"I haven't dissected anything for three years"  
"But you've read _this" _James waved with the instructions, "over a hundred times already and you know it like the back of your hand"

"But you, you butter toast with _such _precision"

It was clear that none of them wanted the responsibility for screwing up, but it was also clear that they needed to act fast. Asking a healer was not an option, they had already proven to be uncooperative several times and they simply could not risk being kicked out. They gawked at Sirius as if he was a northern light and questioned their sexualities for a moment. Quarter veelas were truly the worst patients. Ten minutes had passed when they snapped out of their fanboy modes.

"For the first time I wish we could just ask Dumbledore" said James. "Or some other responsible yet non-rigid grownup. But unfortunately everybody seems to think that earworms are about as real as nargles"

Remus smacked his forehead. "I have been so stupid"  
"Could you try to stick to the topic, 'though?"

"What about Hagrid?"

"What about him?"

"Well he's always looking after some baby cockatrice or injured quintotaur. He's basically a self-taught veterinarian"

"But you've seen his cupcakes. He doesn't exactly pipe with precision or time his minuets"

"Piping cupcakes is really difficult"

The next question was who was going to get him, and that would just have to be settled with rock, scissors and paper.

It took James ten minutes to get Hagrid, and passing him off as a healer was very difficult. Because he was a lot bigger than an average sized wizard, one average dose of instant-poly wasn't enough to completely transform him into an elderly nurse who, according to her ID, was called Grizabella Mint. So he looked like a strange hybrid between half half-giant and half elderly woman. But showing staff members the ID warded off their suspicion.

"I don't know why I went along with this" he said. "It's different with magical creatures"  
"But he's quarter magical creature watch" James cut open an IV bag and poured it over Sirius's head. The liquid bounced off him like water off Teflon. But Hagrid wasn't convinced.

"That's hardly enough to make him a _real _magical creature, is it?"

"No but it's all he does" Remus shrugged.

"'People fall in love with me left and right woe is me!'" Hagrid snorted. "Special hair… These days everybody and their gran is quarter-goblin or half-unicorn like it's trendy!"

"I know. They know nothing about the real struggle"

"'I'm only a perfectly ordinary wizard for 29,5 days at a time, _so difficult!'"_

"How many meds are you on right now? Come on, how many?" Remus rolled up a sleeve and searched his bag for a syringe. _Perfectly ordinary… _There really was a first time for everything.

"Maybe we should try and focus" said James. "Now's not the time to be elitist"

"Oh, ok!" Remus rolled his eyes, injecting the UTK Stabilizer.

Hagrid bowed all the way to the floor. "The wizard has spoken. We must obey"

"Oppressor…"

"Way to judge a book by the cover" said James. "I have you know I have some gorgon ancestry"

"No you _don't"_

"Do _too! _My great gran way, way back had a thing for gorgons and please don't ask me to go into details"  
They really didn't need him to go into details; they were capable of picturing things for themselves. Their imaginations took such horrifying turns that they began to prepare for the scorching just to spare themselves from the images.

Voldemort turned in his turny chair behind the massive desk in his study room, looking over the resume of the latest French aristocrat applying to join his Eaters.

"Well, Atria Bonnuit-" he said.

"Non, non, _non!" _ Bellatrix, disguised in a hood with a beret on top, interrupted. "Not _Baw Knew It. Bonnuit!"_

"Right" Frenchys were so annoying, Voldemort thought, they always corrected your pronunciation even when you said things correctly enough. "It sounds like Bonnet so I'm just going to call you Bonnet"  
Bellatrix blushed bashfully under her hood, although she nurtured a dream of one day being called Bella-Tree again.

"So, Bonnet" Voldemort said. "You're very qualified. Killed over 200 muggles, tortured over 500 with a 75% insanity rate. You have accomplished more than all of my Eaters combined. How on earth have you not gotten caught?"  
"Le connections, and also le body"

"Hm…" Voldemort put down the resume and leaned back, distracted.

"What is it Monsieur Dark Lord?"

"You remind me of somebody else, that's all"

Bellatrix leaned over the desk. "A beautiful woman?" she whispered.

"_Woman?" _ Voldemort laughed heartily. "No… " he sighed sentimentally. "Now the ancient Greeks, they had the right idea…"

Bellatrix looked like she had swallowed a lemon. She crawled off the table. Even in a coma that airheaded brat had to ruin everything for her.

"And this person of whom you speak, has he accomplished more than me? Killed over 200 muggles and tortured over 500 with a 75% insanity rate?"

"No but he is younger than you are"  
Bellatrix was in the mood of making sure he never got older. "How many, then?"

"Listen to this" Voldemort reached for a Prophet and unfolded it. "80 potato farmers strangled to death by vicious Devil Sprouts. I didn't even know there was such a thing as vicious potatoes"

"I could use vicious potatoes if that's what Monsieur wants-"

"It's not about what I want; it's about thinking outside the box and not sticking to conventional methods. Surprise factor"

If only Bellatrix could tell him about her outside-the-box use of Narco Herrings.

"You seem to have this fellow in very high regard. How long have you known him?" She tried to sounds as if she was only making small talk.

"A couple of weeks"  
"Monsieur Dark Lord, what does vous think of earworms?"

"Works like a charm"

Bellatrix tried to choose her words carefully. "But it's not _real, _though. I mean, how can they ever truly learn the truth when they are under that kind of manipulation? If you don't mind me being so blunt"  
Voldemort folded the Prophet and threw it back into drawer. "Miss Bonnet I don't care. The ends justify the means"  
"Yes you are so wise, so wise you are" Bellatrix strummed her long, manicured fingers against each other. "But it's not just that their brains are manipulated, is it? They become gradually more insane and what I'm curious to know is this; how precisely does the greater good benefit from that?"

"It was all planned very carefully and tested on pixies and gnomes beforehand. I know it didn't go entirely according to plan but nobody will go insane as long as the trigger word isn't uttered, and the odds of that happening are extremely low. So far no insanity cases have been reported to me, _Bella"_

The beret fell of when Bellatrix pulled down the hood and she laughed nervously. "Nothing gets by you, Mr. Dark Lord!"

"Did you try to deceive me?"

Bellatrix crawled over the desk again. "Please let me serve you again! Were you not pleased with my services? You should have said something!"

"I made a deal"  
"So? You're the Dark Lord! I'm sure you can think of a way to take it back. Come on! Whatever he does I can do ten times better, _you know it!"  
_But Voldemort just shook his head, chuckling so his shoulders bounced. "Bella, Bella, Bella. Just because you don't _officially _serve the Eaters at the moment doesn't mean you're not still serving _me!"_

After first blinking a couple of time Bellatrix tried to reach to touch Voldemort.

"What do you want? Say the word! Master!"

Voldemort rolled with his chair to the left side of his desk and picked up a letter.

"You came just in time" he said.

"Yes"

"I just received a letter. An attempt at scorching his brain is being made right now. You have to go to St Mungos and stop it. Nobody can know it was earworms"

Bellatrix got off the desk and saluted. "Right away, master! I shan't disappoint you! Say no more I will kill him immediately-"

"No don't _kill _him! Bring him to me!"

"Oh, of course. There's no rush. You're so wise, master" Bellatrix grabbed her coat from the chair, stuck the tip of her shoe under the beret and kicked it into her hand and disapparated immediately in a cloud of glimmering crystals.


	30. The Werechameleon

Always Purée

Part 30: The Werechameleon

A pink straw had been stuck in an incision in the temple area. Scorching potion was dripped into it with a pipette in an interval of 2,5 drops every 16th second in sync with the heartbeat. Hagrid had very delicate hands for a half-giant with a handkerchief on the head and fortunately he had the good sense to use a timer for a change. An empty old 78 record of clock sound effects crackled on a phonograph and a cuckoo clock sat on the equipment cart. Hagrid asked for a scalpel. An hour had passed since the start and he was now halfway through the procedure and so far nothing seemed to have gone wrong. Then the unlocked doors flew open and Professor McGonagall came barging in.

"_What _in the _devil's _name is going on here?!" she yelled.

"It's the earworms" Hagrid explained. "They have to be removed"  
McGonagall stomped towards them and none of the amateur healers had ever seen her so angry.

"There's _no _such _thing _as _earworms!" _ Whipping out her wand she stunned Hagrid first and the boys second. Then Bellatrix shifted back into her favoured form. Polyjuice was for amateurs, not werechameleons. Looking down at her body she saw that she had had one too many blancmanges lately and slimmed down her waist some more. Then she walked over to Sirius, steadily on her sewing string heels, and looked down on him scornfully.

"So you can make the Dark Lord all goo-goo eyed, but can you do this?" She turned around and shrunk her butt a little, taking a moment to find the appropriate size that was curvaceous without being big. "You veelas have it easy, you never have to pretend… "

As she imagined Voldemort walking in on her true form and reacting with horror and disgust she began to shed some tears. She dried them off quickly. "I mean, what's a little scale? If he ever found out I'm actually a man…"

She shook away the thoughts and grabbed Sirius under the arms and disapparated with him, just before Mac and Cas came barging in, delayed because Lily had set them up for detention to stop them from interfering with an act that could threaten the noble ideology of purism. Cas didn't really serve purism, she just wanted to serve the love of her life.

"The security at St Mungos is really shitty" she said, squatting down by Remus to cast _Salus Volatilus _on him while Mac did the same to James and Hagrid.

"I know, ever since those financial cut backs"

The stunned ones blinked and attempted to sit up.

"What happened?" James asked dizzily. "Where's…what's-his-name…"

"Oh no!" Cas put her hand to her mouth. "Amnesia!"

"Sirius?" Mac asked.

"Yes, that" James nodded, getting up. He knew it had been something punny.

"A Death Eater showed up and got him"

"Did you see it happen?"

"Lily ratted you out in a letter to Voldemort and then she did a bunch of stuff to delay us" said Cas. "She was pretty up front about everything. The worm people, they're crazy but they're honest"

"So that wasn't really Professor McGonagall" said Hagrid, rubbing the back of his head. "I better inform Dumbledore of everything right away, once I've brought you all back to Hog-"

Four stunning rays hit Hagrid right in the chest and knocked him down like timber a second time, and several carts and trays of equipment with him.

The stabbing head ache felt like having a serrated knife sawing at the brain like a bread roll. Sirius sat slouched on the chair in Voldemort's room. Bandage had been wrapped around the top of his head. Voldemort was looking down at him almost paternally.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

"Fine"

"Because you're brain has just been scorched"

Panic struck, Sirius rand a hand over his head, checking for shaved patches but finding none.

"I guess they didn't have the heart to remove your miracle hair" said Bellatrix.

Sirius ignored looking at her completely. "What is _she _doing here? I thought we had a deal"

"Bella, leave" said Voldemort.

"And don't let the door hit your miracle buttocks on the way out!"

Bellatrix closed her long fingers around Sirius neck and dug her nails into the skin and explained to him in great detail just how she intended to kill him while he slowly began to turn blue. Voldemort had to pull her off and escort her out of the room.

"Why all this hate?" he asked when they were both in the hall outside. "Haven't you heard that blood is purer than water?"

"I'm sorry, master" Bellatrix calmed herself. "He's just ruined my life so many times. He's ruined prom nights, engagements, birth control. _He's always been such a nightmare!_" She raised her voice and knocked furiously on the door.

"That's odd. From the little I heard I got an entirely different impression. I was expecting somebody soppy"

"I couldn't very well tell you all of this because I knew you'd just like him! He's always had this great potential for evil, so why has he always directed his horrible schemes at me?" Bellatrix sighed. "We used to get along so well. He was like the little brother I always wanted… to turn gay"

"You have to put the past behind you. And it's never too late to turn someone gay"

"You're so wise, master. Always so wise"  
"He seems fine. Try to get on his good side, that way you can report to me if you notice anything strange"

Bellatrix nodded, well aware that Voldemort always knew best, before they both went back inside the room.


	31. I See A Little Silhouetto Of A Man

Always Purée

Part 31: I See A Little Silhouetto Of A Man

The headquarters looked like somebody's home. James looked through doors here and there with his see-ear, which he had simply stuck to one lens, something nobody could see when he had a mask over it all. Uncomfortable, but handy in this situation. He eventually saw Sirius inside a drawing room with the beautiful but mad witch that had cast banana peels after him. Now he was painting her nails. James wondered if there was a kind of nail polish flea that ate nails by any chance. Then he gave the door the secret knock, which was basically the rhythm to the intro of the operatic bit in _Bohemian Rhapsody; _knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock, knock-knockknockknock-knock, knock-knockknockknock knock. _Scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango?_

He saw Sirius get up but instead of coming to the door he seemed to disappear into another room. Then something very heavy hit him in the back of the head and he blacked out. Sirius dropped the frying pan. The unfinished scorching treatment had reversed him back to his early stage of sociopathy and he dragged James by the legs all the way down to the utility room where he locked him up in a cupboard. In doing so Sirius noticed that he had a necklace around his neck with several religious symbols and immediately jumped to the conclusion that Remus was around somewhere too with a new kind of vermin. Sirius took the necklace and put it around his own neck before leaving to find the second unwelcome guest.

Sneezing Mite, or _Sourcarachnus Morphiopium, _released a kind of gas when sneezing that put the unprotected in a very relaxed state bordering on vacant. It was slow acting but efficient. Remus wasn't releasing any mite, just the gas. His spraying device had a mouth piece disguised as a false eye beneath his mask and it was connected to a tube that ran under his robes and oversized sleeves to the squisher at the other end that he kept under his glove. The Death Eaters sat around a large table playing 20 questions, one of them occasionally glancing at the Eater with the weird eye that seemed to find the walls more interesting. Then a well meaning Eater thought that perhaps he was just new and shy and went to ask him if he wanted to play 20 questions with them and when Remus had politely declined the Eater had mistaken it for modesty and thought that he just needed a little pushing. When his hand dressed in silver rings under the glove had closed around Remus's arm it had hurt so much he gave him a good spraying of Sneezing Gas, knocking the Eater out completely. But alas, unwanted attention had been attracted, his device was taken from him and he was brought to Voldemort.

"Alright _you" _Voldemort circled him, fiddling with the eye-spray. "Where did you get this?"

"Stole it" Remus was tied to a chair. Beside him stood a Death Eater that insisted his name was pronounced _Ma-go _and not _Maggot _holding a branding iron he dipped in a bucket of melted silver whenever Voldemort demanded it. They were never out of silver at the headquarters.

"I knew that, but from who?" said Voldemort.

"_Whom"_

"Maggot!"

Magot took a moment to react. "I'm sorry did my Lord refer to me?"

"Yes of course I did!"  
"I thought that maybe you were likening the visitor to a maggot-"

"Just do your thing"

Magot dipped the branding iron in the silver, scraped off the excess on the sides of the bucket and branded Remus in the forehead. The only reason he hadn't passed out yet was because of the medallion of endurance all victims were forced to wear. The hot iron hissed when it pressed against the skin.

"So, you stubborn smart mouth, why did you come here?" Voldemort asked.

Remus heaved from exhaustion. "To steal things"

"I should have known… Well, Tim, at least you're honest. But I just don't know why I shouldn't just kill you right on the spot"  
Voldemort put down the spraying device on the desk among the other items Magot had found searching Remus's pockets. "Somebody will be happy to have their badge and 11 inch Willow back"

"Shall I fetch an executor, My Lord, or do you wish to take care of it?" Magot asked.

"Go and get the first volunteer you can find, will you?"

With a bow Magot left to obey his master. Voldemort picked up the branding iron just to feel the weight of it. He tortured so rarely nowadays because he always got one of his minions to do it. He considered giving the boy a couple of good brandings just for old times' sake when Magot returned with a willing executor.

"Excellent" said Voldemort. "I knew you'd go in for this sort of thing. Meanwhile I haven't had a smoke in what feels like ages…" And despite this unexpected occurrence, Voldemort really didn't want to miss his flight to the Azores. He hadn't been on holiday for so long.

"You go and have one, I'll take care of everything" Sirius assured him, and added when Voldemort still seemed just a little bit hesitating: "I know _just _how to torture this one, if you don't mind me having a bit of fun first"

"Not at all. Maggot will stay and assist you" said Voldemort and left the room. Sirius inspected the branding iron.

"Well, well, well! I bet you thought it wouldn't get worse than this"  
Magot gasped, horrified. "What could be worse?"

"Oh, I don't think you could handle being a witness. You should probably go outside"  
It was Magot's turn to look hesitating. "I don't know. The Dark Lord did say to assist you-"

"I know, it means to do as I say so shoo before I end you too!" And just to show he meant business he blasted one of Magot's hands off. Magot screamed as the bloody and fleshy pieces of his former hand stuck to the walls. Sirius pushed him out of the room and closed the door behind him.

"Now then" Sirius cracked his fingers. "Try not to lose your mind too quickly"  
He reached into his pocket and unfolded a piece of paper and began reading from it:

"'_Captain' said Mr Spock, 'You don't look too well'. Captain Kirk pulled his tight yellow shirt over his head. 'I'm fine, Mr Spock' he assured his science officer. They were as good as alone on the bridge because all the other space ship blokes were still unconscious from the Klingon attack and just sat slouched in their chairs like bean bags"_

Ok, so it was a really badly written Star Trek fanfic, but Remus had read way worse. And with way, way worse grammar.

"'_It looks like it's just you and me'_, _expressed Captain Kirk verbally as he neared the Vulcan"_

So the writer was using the cheapest tricks in the book to avoid sounding repetitive, but still, Remus had read way, way worse.

"_For some reason the pointy eared alien became nervous-"  
_"For God's sake-"

"Silence!" Sirius slapped Remus with the back of his hand and continued: "_'Don't be afraid', articulated the light haired human as he pulled the tall and lean _space creature-"

"Oh come on! They're _all _space creatures!"

"I thought I told you to shut up!" Sirius slapped him again. "Don't make me brand you!"

"Please, please just brand me"

"I said to shush!" Sirius raised his hand for a third slap but retracted it because Remus seemed to have gotten the message. "Where was I…? _'Captain' stuttered the extraterrestrial in blue weakly, 'What are you doing?' 'Look around' whispered the slightly fattening bridge supervisor, 'It's just you and me'. Captain Kirk pulled Mr Spock close to him and kissed him hard as he stuck his hands down Mr Spock's tight, grey pants, whispering that they go to the kitchen-"_

"Ok, stop! Stop right there!"

"You know, in America they say 'pants' when they mean 'trousers' , so keep that in mind. Anyway. '_What if the doctor walks in on us?' Spock inquired. 'Then we will ask Bones to join us' Captain Kirk replied, pressing his sturdy body hard against the brittle frame of Mr Spock's and panting heavily with lust as he pulled down his underpants- _Which is to say, pants"

"Please" Remus pleaded, on the verge of sobbing because he was already so tired from being branded, from the current position of natural satellites and the extra meds he had to take because of it. "Please just stop"

"Give me _one reason!"_

Sirius waited, challenging Remus with his cold, piercing stare, and Remus looked up to meet his gaze.

"Because… I love you?"

At first Sirius just frowned at him, his mind too blank to see how that was a valid argument. Then things began to click. Remus shut his eyes tightly for there was a chance he would just be mistaken for a freak poof and killed on the spot.

"Oh _now _I get it!" Sirius finally said. "You think that when all else has failed, the precious power of _love _will cure all hatred and fix everything!" Sirius tossed his head back and laughed diabolically, "Well, if that isn't the soppiest load of bollocks I've ever heard I just…"

Sirius eyes rolled back in their sockets and he fell like rake, dropping his wand in Remus's lap in his fall, positioning it just close enough to be used to loosen the ropes. When Remus had freed himself he got down on the floor by Sirius and hoped dearly that the precious power of _Salus Volatilus _would be enough to wake him.

Sirius opened his eyes again. "What happened?" He sat up and looked at the paper in his hand. "Why did I bring Cas's fanfic?"

"Please tell me you're yourself again" said Remus.

The memory of every cruel thing he had said and done from his early childhood to passing out washed over Sirius liked a monsoon. When his life had finished flashing before his eyes he looked very remorseful and could only barely look up.

"I love you too, by the way"

It all felt a little bit awkward. "Let's just go" said Remus, about to get up when Sirius pulled him back down and hugged him closely.

Suddenly the door opened and there was Voldemort.

"What's going on?"

"Not much yet" said Sirius, pouting a little.

"Care to tell me why I couldn't summon you?"

"Erm…"

Voldemort didn't wait for any excuses and just pulled up Sirius's sleeve and saw several layers of bandage where the tattoo had been.

"Self harm" Sirius shrugged. "It's a terrible thing"

"Let me end your misery right now" Voldemort raised his wand. "_Avada-"_

Voldemort's face became twisted and his eyes became glassy. Then he began to twitch and jerk uncontrollably.

"Nooo!" he screamed as he slowly transformed into some kind of nosferatu-chameleon hybrid with bulging eyes and a curled tail. "Don't look at me! _Don't look at me!" _The strange creature ran off, weeping. James emerged in the door frame next, along with Mac and Cas.

"That was weird" he said "Is this a bad time?"

"Yes" said Sirius.  
"So are you done with the Inquisifabs?" Mac asked.

"You know" said Sirius, pulling down his sleeves and getting up. "Having loyal followers worshipping the ground you walk on? Not what it's cracked up to be"

"You kind of had that before"

There was no real hurry to leave because most of the Death Eaters had been in the drawing room playing 20 questions where the gas had been released and it was sure to have affected them all by now. Out in the hall they saw or heard no signs of any lurking Eaters.

"What a stroke of luck, that your brain was scorched just enough for it to work" said James.

"Or maybe it was the power of love" Mac suggested.

"Power of what love?" Cas asked, capping her lipstick. "Who's love? _Who is she?!"_

Thankfully the swishy sound of an approaching snake sent them running for their dear lives so they wouldn't have to go into any details.


	32. The Power Of Love

Always Purée

Part 32: The Power Of Love

Miss Goody thanked the audience for listening to the third version of her presentation about her search for a frog prince and returned to her seat.

"Yes, the power of love" said Professor Cornball. "It's a powerful force indeed. It can turn a frog into a prince and a leech pillow into a school nurse"

Professor Cornball had never looked happier than now. He explained how he had fallen in love with a pillow when he had done a quick check-up at St Mungos and how he had thought there had been something very wrong with him. The Pomfrey that James and Remus thought they had saved had in fact been her evil twin sister Periwinkle Pomfrey, pretending to be Poppy so nobody would think she was missing, all in the name of keeping earworms as a creature of the fairy tales. He explained thoroughly how everything interconnected and it all made sense and everybody who listened and weren't away having their brains scorched or distracted by slash fanfics would leave with no questions unanswered.

"'_Damn it, Spock!' the medical man put into words" _James read from Cas's latest Spirk fanfic. "'_You're such a machine! It's like you have no heart!' The figure with the helmet hair blinked away some tears. 'It's because you broke it'" _James turned the page, looking for the continuation, but Sirius had the 9th page.

"'_Sometimes' verbalized the space ship healer, 'you have to break something before you can mend it' Then the older bloke with the weird body structure pulled the one with the weird eyebrows closer to him and kissed him hard in the Starship Enterprise kitchen where they had gone for some frozen space food and kissed him hard and then-"_

And then Professor Cornball took 50 points from Gryffindor and confiscated the fanfictions.

"Writing that is great fun and all" said Cas, who sat by a group of tables nearby, "I just wish I could make money off of it"  
"Mac?" said James, and Mac turned her attention to him. "What was that last night, about the power of love? Were you sarcastic?"

"Not at all" said Mac sincerely. "You heard Cornball; love can be very powerful when it comes to internal and external transformations"

"Ok" said James, turning to both Sirius, who had taken it upon himself to write a _Spells & Curses _fanfic, and Remus, who looked like he was paying attention in class but was really curbing that growing irritation that made itself known so regularly and was triggered by, among several things, time wasting classes, "I just want you two to know that if you did any hard kissing last night, it's all fine"

"What?" Peter asked. He had recovered from the swan princess attack yesterday and had to wear an eye patch for a month.

"Well thanks" said Sirius. "Do we also have your permission to marry?"

"Ok, but no frocks!"


End file.
